[Today's post comes to us courtesy of David Copeland from Commercial Technical Support] The September update for the WSSG BPA has now been released, adding 59 new rules. Currently the total number of checks per SKU breaks down as (total of 107 total rules)
Small Business Server 2011 Standard Edition 102 Small Business Server 2011 Essentials 78 Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials 30 Windows MultiPoint Server 2011 5
You will be notified of the update in a couple of places. If you have chosen to integrate the BPA into the SBS console during installation, the BPA will have a status of critical under the Security menu. You will see this until the update is applied:
You will also see that “An update for the Windows Server Solutions BPA is available” in the systray when you launch the BPA. You need to click this notification to install the update:
The model for the WSSG BPA has been updated with new rules including: Small Business Server 2011 Standard Edition
Small Business Server 2011 Essentials
Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials
[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Moloy Tandon and Wayne Gordon McIntyre from Commercial Technical Support]
By default Small Business Server 2011 Essentials does not install the DHCP Server role and DHCP duties are handled by your router. In some cases you may want to have the SBS 2011 Essentials server be the DHCP server instead of your router. To do so, first, you need to assign a static IP address to the server's network card. Installing the DHCP Server role without a static IP address is not recommended.
To find out your current TCP/IP settings, launch an elevated command prompt and run the command ipconfig, and make a note of the IPv4 address, Subnet Mask and Default Gateway.
Launch ncpa.cpl from the run menu or an elevated cmd prompt, which will load the Network Connections control panel. Right click on your network card and select Properties which will bring up the following screen as shown below.
Select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) and then click Properties
You will want to enter an IP address within the same network range as noted earlier (e.g 192.168.15.2). Additionally, add the exact same subnet mask and default gateway that was identified earlier when running ipconfig, and lastly enter the IP address of the server as the preferred DNS server and then click Ok and then Close.
To install the DHCP Server role on SBS 2011 Essentials follow these steps:
Once you have successfully installed and configured the DHCP Server role on SBS 2011 Essentials, you need to turn off DHCP on the router. To do this, follow the instruction manual that came with the router. Next, you need to renew the IP address on the clients. To do this, launch an elevated command prompt on the workstation and run ipconfig/release && ipconfig/renew.
Lastly, you may want to stop and disable the Windows Server LAN Configuration service on the client machines since its function is no longer required. To know more about this service, check out this great blog post from Sean Daniel: The Basics of Local DNS for Small Business Server 2011 Essentials
[Today’s post comes to us courtesy David Fabritius from Windows Server Marketing]
Last year we introduced the Windows Small Business Server 2011 Premium Add-On, which offers a more flexible solution to our customers’ needs for running line-of-business (LOB) applications and other workloads. Today we are happy to announce that starting September 15, 2011, we have pushed that flexibility even further: you may now use the SBS 2011 Premium Add-On in SBS 2008 environments! The SBS 2011 Premium Add-On includes an additional license for Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard, which allows you to deploy another server in your SBS 2011 or SBS 2008 network, and SQL Server 2008 R2 for Small Business, which contains a range of features that can help businesses maximize the value of their information with greater capabilities in development, manageability, business intelligence, and data warehousing. SQL Server 2008 R2 for Small Business has exactly the same capabilities as SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard, however it is only available to use in SBS 2011 and SBS 2008 environments.
Starting today our customers who have SBS 2008 Standard but need the additional functionality of the SBS 2011 Premium Add-On to improve the way they run their businesses can take advantage of this opportunity to add premium functionality without fully upgrading to SBS 2011. And customers who already have SBS 2008 Premium can add an additional SBS 2011 Premium Add-On server to their network should that need arise.
Deploying the SBS 2011 Premium Add-On in an SBS 2008 environment requires an additional SBS 2011 CAL Suite for each user that connects to the SBS 2011 Premium Add-on server. Also note that the total number of SBS 2011 Premium Add-on CALs must not exceed 25 for SBS 2011 Essentials environments and 75 for SBS 2011 Standard or SBS 2008 environments.
For more information, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/sbs.
[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Damian Leibaschoff and Justin Crosby from Commercial Technical Support]
Last Tuesday (9/13/2011), KB2494001 “MS11-074: Description of the security update for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010: September 13, 2011” was released to Microsoft Update.
By default, the update will be automatically approved for installation on SBS 2011 Standard. However it will still require administrative action to be installed.
As with all SharePoint Foundation 2010 updates, you must complete the update process by running psconfig after the update is installed. If your server is not yet running SP1 for Windows SharePoint Foundation and you do not run psconfig after installing this update you may encounter the issues described in http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2011/07/06/potential-issues-after-installing-sharepoint-foundation-2010-sp1.aspx. The most common issue is that SBS backups start failing.
The symptoms and behavior are described here in more detail:
To resolve this issue you must run psconfig as described in this blog:
Since Windows SharePoint Foundation 2011, included in SBS 2011 Standard, is the first version that requires psconfig to be launched manually we expect that this is an issue that will linger for the foreseeable future.
To address this issue we have introduced a new feature in SBS 2011 UR1. SBS 2011 Standard Rollup Update 1 was released yesterday (9/15/2011) and when installed, it adds warnings in the console and the desktop that will help identify this situation and provide documentation on how to recover.
After installing the rollup, a new scheduled task will be created; this task is set to run every day at 1:15am.
This task scans the event logs to see if the SharePoint Health Monitor that is scheduled to run at 12:00am has detected a situation that requires the databases to be upgraded using psconfig.
When the issue is detected, a Domain Wide group policy that is created by the UR is enabled to show the message on logon to any Domain Admin login on to any domain workstation. When is no longer detected, the User configuration settings are disabled.
When the issue is active, this is what a domain administrator will see when logging on:
Note: this message will only be cleared after the issue is resolved and the schedule task runs again that night. If needed, you can re-run the scheduled task in Task Manager, under Microsoft\Windows\Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard.
The task writes a log called WSSPsconfigurationNotification.log in C:\Program Files\Windows Small Business Server\logs.
We also have the more traditional console alert, if configured, an email will be sent when this alert is detected.
The alerts point to Kb2580174 Receiving SharePoint Health Analyzer alerts in SBS 2011 Standard
[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Justin Crosby from Commercial Technical Support]
Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard Update Rollup 1 has been released and is available for download. You can read about the issues this rollup addresses in KB2555251. Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard UR1 can be installed via Microsoft Update or WSUS. We will be discussing some of the changes in more depth in upcoming blog posts.
[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Gagan Mehra from Commercial Technical Support]
Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials Update Rollup 1 has been released and is available for download. You can read about the issues this rollup addresses in KB2554629. Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials UR1 can be installed via Microsoft Update.
In addition to the sever-side update KB2554629, a second client-side update has been released. This update is documented in KB2554657. You can use Microsoft Update to install this on each of your SBS 2011 Essential client machines. The client-side update supports Windows XP SP2 and later.