Nicholas King

Check out the next in the Slice series.  User Roles in Small Business Server 2008.

User roles are incredibly important when maintaining a secure infrastructure.  They allow administrators to simply create standard users based off of a usage profile designated from the SBS 2008 console.  This means less opportunity for administrative error during user provisioning.

Another contribution from David F our Partner TPM.

The announcements start coming out from WPC.  First up Steven announces launch date.

Public launch for Small Business Server and Essential Business Server is November 12.

You can read the full press release here

Another work of art from David.  Check out this time the Distribution and Security Groups VLOG.

Notice how simple it is to create mail distribution groups without touching the Active Directory Users and Computers MMC.

Also make sure you pay attention to what each of the preinstalled groups do too. 

Roll camera!

Recently I’ve had a couple people ask me about the system requirements for EBS.   As part of the Reviewers Guide we wrote up the specs below.  Caveat:  These are only current for the RC0 release.

<snip>

Windows Essential Business Server 2008 Standard Edition is only available as a 64-bit operating system; your server hardware must have a 64-bit processor to install and use Windows Essential Business Server 2008. Windows Essential Business Server 2008 Premium Edition adds a fourth server running either 32-bit or 64-bit versions of the operating system.

All server hardware should meet the requirements established for the Windows Server 2008 Logo Program for Systems. You can learn more about these requirements by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/hwrequirements.mspx.

Processors

· Systems with a Single Core CPU – x64 with a 2.5 GHz minimum clock speed;

· Systems with a Multi Core CPU – x64 with a 1.5 GHz minimum clock speed;

· Systems with Multiple Physical CPUs – x64 with a 1.5 GHz minimum clock speed;

RAM

· Management Server – 4 GB of RAM;

· Security Server – 2 GB of RAM;

· Messaging Server – 4 GB of RAM;

Hard Disk Drives

· Operating System Drive Partition – Minimum of 40 GB of free disk space;

· Application Data Drive Partition – Minimum of 20 GB of free disk space;

When determining the appropriate disk space for your Application Data partition, you should consider all aspects of storage needs, including the Exchange Server 2007 databases, the redirection of a user’s Documents folders, and other application data. See figure 1 for a sample hard disk drive configuration.

Recommended Hard Disk Configuration for Management and Messaging Servers

o Eight hard disk drive bays (provides for in-server storage expansion);

o Operating system stored on RAID 1 volumes - application data stored on RAID 5 volumes.

Recommended Hard Disk Configuration for Security Server

o Two or more hard disk drive bays;

o Operating System and Application Data stored on a single RAID 1 volume

Figure 1 – Sample Hard Disk Drive Configuration

Other Requirements

· DVD-ROM – Must be bootable from the system BIOS or a peripheral connection such as a USB port.

· Network Interface Card (NIC) – One network adapter that supports a 10 Mbps or greater link speed. Two network adapters are required for the Security Server.

Other Recommendations

· Dedicated hot swap hard disk drive configured for RAID 1 or RAID 5 volume failover.

· Redundant power supply for each server.

· Hard disk speeds 15K RPM or greater.

· One or more additional network adapters per server at 100Mbps or greater.

<\snip>

David Fabritius was busy over the weekend and put together another SBS 2008 VLOG slice.  Check out the next installment with a drill down of the User Group Properties.

Key things to call out.  Look at the options available within the UI on the right pane, allowing you to simply make changes.  Also make sure you check out the control you have over that users experience. Everything from access to Remote Web Workplace, right through email configuration quota.

Listen to Steven VanRoekel talk about EBS 2008 with Joe Wilcox.  Steven is probably the nicest guy at Microsoft, and adds to his list of accomplishments not only directing the Server Solutions group at Microsoft, which includes Home Server, Small Business Server and EBS 2008, but also was Bill Gates’ speech writer for several years.

Anyway definitely worth a listen.

Check it out here

P.S Check out the video we did about Watson Furniture which Steven mentions here

Here’s a little bit of extra goodness for those of you wanting to run Vista within your SBS 2008 environment.  Ever wanted to put something else on your sidebar?  Check out the SBS Vista Gadget below.  When you join a client to your SBS domain we push this gadget down to the client.  Once you add the gadget you get some pretty cool features.

Let’s take a look what this does from a user perspective.

1. No requirement for users to remember the Remote Web Workplace URL
2. Access to published links (I’ll show you how to do this further down)
3. Simple access to the Companyweb SharePoint Site
4. One click access to Outlook Web Access (OWA)

Why is all of this so cool?  Well, we learnt that one of the pain points found by SBs is the complexity in remembering all of those links.  This gadget really goes a long way in making that simple.

But wait there is still more.  I bet your thinking “Can I add other items to this gadget?”, the answer is YES.

All of these links come from the Remote Web Workplace, link set up page, so you can easily add other links to your gadget (or RWW for that matter).  The next time the group policy updates your gadget will get a refresh.

To customize these links:

• Open the SBS 2008 admin console

• Select Remote Web Workplace and Click view site properties

• The dialog box above should appear, then click home page links

• Click Manage Links

• You can then add a new link by typing the link description and address and then clicking add.  Ok all of the Windows and there you have it.  You’ve customized RWW and the Vista Gadget.

There you have it!

Well after a short stay here on my blog you may have noticed that the EBS slice demos have found a new home.  As of Monday this week, I’ve moved the EBS part of this side project to be directly on the EBS blog.  What about SBS you may ask?  Well, that’s a surprise… You’ll have to wait and see.

Thanks to everyone for their feedback so far.  There really has been overwhelming demand for these.

Do keep the ideas coming and make sure you check out the EBS blog here

Another addition to the VLOG Slice series.  This time contributed by David Fabritius our resident Partner Technical Product Manager.  Some of you my also recognize his voice from the now famous 5w/50 US partner sessions.

See the Slice demo below.  Core things to watch for;

• Simplified add user UI
• More secure by design
• Setup of multiple workloads all in one simple wizard
• Guidance to enable tech-savvy business owners to do this too!

I was having a discussion today about what’s actually in Premium Edition of both Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008.  So I started to whiteboard it up to explain it to a few of my colleagues.  After I finished we thought this would make a great blog post.  So you can make out my handwriting I’ll rewrite everything here as well.

SBS 2008 Premium Edition

You get everything you see in the Standard Edition plus…

A second license for Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition Technologies, both 32 and 64 bit versions are included (you get two disks but have to choose which one you want to use).  We do make some changes to these;

It must be a member server of an SBS 2008 domain and it must have have less than 75 users or devices in the network.  That’s all we do.  Now you may have noticed word ‘technologies’ when I explain Windows Server, our intention there is to make sure people know that is not the same as Windows Server 2008 Standard.  But apart from those two changes it is Windows Server 2008 Standard.

So the next question you’re going to ask is usually;

Q: Does it support Terminal Services Application Mode  

A: YES

Q: Does it include Hyper-V

A: YES

Next up I want to talk about SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition for Small Business.  In SBS 2008 we will ship both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of SQL 2008 (both live on the same disk). Again you get to choose one and are licensed for one instance.  We’ll also provide downgrade rights for SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition.  Same deal here when it comes to the for Small Business piece of the name of SQL Server, we just ensure that you don’t have more than 75 connections.

Lastly you might be wondering do we treat this server any differently?  In fact we don’t we treat it as any other member server in the domain.  Remember it’s possible to add other member servers to an SBS domain too.

EBS 2008 Premium Edition

When it comes to EBS it gets really simple.  Simply replace the numbers and the name with 300 and EBS you get the premium scenario.

The 75 user/device limit becomes 300.

We do some naming changes too, but only a small one - SQL Server 2008 loses its for Small Business moniker

Client Access Licensing

One thing worth noting here is if you are connecting to the SQL instance you should buy the Premium CAL.  You can read more about the CALs here for EBS and here for SBS.

In this episode of our Essential Server Solutions Vlog Slice I cover the add new user wizard in Essential Business Server 2008.

As we did our research into the typical midsize organization we quickly realized that being able to consistently manage users and ensure that standards were  kept was a real challenge for our customers. 

We also wanted to enable repetitive tasks to be done quickly and simply from the console.  From choosing the email address, to assigning CALs, and managing mailbox quotas, we think we’ve created a real time saver with the add new user wizard.

Make sure you check out all of the things this wizard actually does by checking the status page towards the end of the Vlog.

Susan Bradley's recent post spurned me on to make this entry around contributing to the newsgroup.  You can get detailed instructions from her blog here. 

This same NNTP hosts the EBS newsgroup.  Couple things I should mention :)

1. There are a whole bunch of people from the SBS & EBS team watching and participating in these newsgroups
2. We're actively triaging from this newsgroup, so you never know you might be able to influence the product
3. We love to hear feedback good and bad
4. Our MVPs also watch this closely and are full of real-world info
5. We're giving away prizes for the best questions

Ok so I made the last one up, but seriously, you should check out these newsgroups.  If you're wanting to get up to speed *really* quick this is one of the surefire ways to get all the deep technical details!

Recently I had several people ask me whether it is possible or supported to do a build to build migration or upgrade from the RC0 of either SBS or EBS to RC1 or even RTM. 

Migration and Upgrade are two words often used interchangeably.  Technically as you know they have some very specific meanings.  Upgrade means to take the existing code base and then lay binaries over the top of, or underneath of (believe it or not this is how Vista does it!) the existing installation effectively taking the old installation and making it the new, whilst maintaining the existing configuration.   Migration means setting up a completely new environment and then transferring the settings, user data and  environment functionality to the new setup.

Upgrades are not something we design, test or develop for either SBS or EBS.  For RTM our research points to the fact that most installations have new hardware on site, and added to that the SBS architecture change from 32-bit to 64-bit prohibits us from doing in place upgrades. EBS is V1 so no upgrade requirement there.

This leaves migrations, I need to be very clear that it IS NOT SUPPORTED from any build to build.  Code can and does change from each of these milestones and we focus our resources on shipping a quality product for RTM.  Now that that's out of the way, let's cover if it's possible..

Yes it is possible to do such a migration.  We do this for our TAP customers using the same migration document that is on TechNET (we add some more details to it to cover the changes we make, but for the most part it is the same doc).  Both products have focused heavily on migration scenarios.  I'll break this into two sections to make it read easier.

Small Business Server 2008 Migration

Migration is one of the killer workloads for SBS 2008.  We've built so much from SBS 2003.  An SBS 2008 migration is based off of a domain join side-by-side configuration where you migrate the user accounts and settings from the old machine to the new using a 21 day trust we create.  It is also answer file based so you'll need to kick off the tool found in the SBS 2008 binaries.  You can read more by following the migration guide found here

Essential Business Server 2008 Migration

Now we anticipate that nearly *every* EBS customer will be migrating some data, so that means we very rarely will have a clean install.  Due to this fact we heavily test literally dozens upon dozens of scenarios for migration.  We've also created a clever installation wizard that walks you through planning and preparing your environment, setting up each of the servers, migrating data during this process and finally completing the migration with a series of post-setup tasks.  This also gives you flexibility to gradually migrate you environment across.  Although I have to admit I'm a fan for moving everything across as safely and quickly as possible.  You can check out the EBS migration guide out here

So what does this mean for you?  Well all of that time you used to spend doing migrations can be put towards other tasks.  Like implementing Windows SharePoint Services!

One of the items we focused on with Small Business Server 2008 was how to better enable more flexibility post install.  We got a lot of feedback around how difficult it was to move data repositories around, and the time and supportability complexities involved in doing so. 

OEM and System Builder configurations also benefit from this feature.  How?  Well by deploying everything to start with on to a single volume we enable you to choose how your data drive/s should be configured.  This also means that as the business expands the storage can easily expand with it.  It also gives everything as much flexibility as possible from installation and beyond when it comes to managing your storage.  Want to run everything off one drive?  No problem, but at least when you need to change the storage configuration this wizard makes things a breeze.

This feature enables you to move Exchange, Windows Update, User Redirected Documents and Shared Data from one direct connected drive to another.

I also noticed when I went back to check the time that the whole process only took 5 minutes not the initial 10 I call out in the Vlog.

Part of my role as a Technical Product Manager is to ensure that you get the right content in your exam for Small Business Server 2008.  We've done a bunch of research into the SBS 2003 exam and have taken a lot of that on board to begin building what we aim to be a very relevant and rewarding certification for Small Business Server 2008.

I wanted to share with you all some great courses to be reading up on prior to getting ready for your SBS 2008 certification.  Remember this is to take you from knowing very little about a network environment, and enable you to effectively manage an SBS 2008 environment.

· Course 6420: Fundamentals of a Windows Sever 2008 Network Infrastructure and Application Platform

· Course 6424: Fundamentals of Windows Server 2008 Active Directory

· Course 5115: Installing and Configuring the Windows Vista Operating System

· Course 5116: Configuring Windows Vista Mobile Computing and Applications

You may ask why no Exchange in this list?  Well, we're going to be covering the knowledge you'll need to know plus all of the other exciting bits inside the SBS course.  Although there is nothing to stop you from reading up on the Exchange stuff.  I'm a big believer in the more knowledge, the better.  One thing to note; this list is for the beta Courseware and may change depending on course feedback as we head for RTM.

There's one other thing I think all SBS'ers (and future EBS'ers for that matter) should be very proud of - Understanding a complete solutions environment really puts all of you in the realm of Business Solution Architects, being able to look at a business, recognize issues (both business and technical) and architect and implement a solution that really results in business value.  A skill the entire IT industry strives for.