A Discussion of Essential Business Server with a passionate SBS Consultant and Community Member
I had dinner with a colleague this evening, Michael D. Alligood from Jacksonville, Florida. Michael has been consulting in the IT field for many years, and has like so many successful independent consultants gravitated towards recommending and supporting Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS). Like so many of us he is excited about the upcoming release of SBS 2008, but he also had some questions for me about Microsoft’s new mid-market server solution offering, Windows Essential Business Server (EBS). Because his questions were so relevant to so many consultants who will be looking at EBS as a way to grow their practice, I thought it worthy of documenting the discussion.
<MA> What are the stand-out differences between SBS and EBS?
SBS is really the perfect solution for smaller businesses that have many of the same technological requirements as larger organizations, but without the same infrastructure and support costs. You can literally get an SBS environment off the ground with centralized management, e-mail, intranet, and security for a couple of thousand dollars. For most small businesses this single-server solution is the perfect way to go. EBS is a more serious investment of both time and money, because it is a much more robust and solid solution that requires additional planning and deployment, as well as financial commitment. Whereas the SBS server is installed in a single server (which I have quite often seen implemented on workstation hardware), the base EBS solution is deployed across three servers that leverages the dedicated server hardware for a more robust environment; however I don’t envision even the most basic EBS environments being deployed for under $15,000 when both hardware and software are considered.
From the standpoint of an ongoing commitment, it is quite common for companies with an SBS environment to have as their sole IT support an external Certified Small Business Specialist (SBSC) handing everything computer-related, from soup to nuts. Because EBS is geared at slightly larger organizations the most common solution that I envision will be for those firms to employ an in-house IT specialist – even if that person is strictly an IT generalist, who will leverage external EBS specialists as their consultants for design, planning, and infrastructure, while handling much of the day-to-day tasks in-house. This will be a tremendous opportunity for those SBSCs who are looking at expanding their breadth and increasing their professional value to really concentrate on higher-level issues without having to deal with mundane tasks – I know consultants who take an extra week to deploy SBS environments because once the server is up they need to go from workstation to workstation either joining them to the network, or quite often re-formatting and installing them, a total waste to both the client (paying by the hour) and the consultant (who as often as not finds this task as challenging as falling down).
<MA> Is there a situation in which you would recommend EBS 2008 to a traditionally SBS-type company?
That’s a great question. We are all familiar with the 75 user hard-ceiling that SBS has had since the release of SBS 2003. EBS shatters that limit with an upper-limit of 300 CALs, and of course when an organization grows near and especially beyond seventy-five, there is a licensing need to migrate to EBS. However the number of users is only one deciding factor when choosing EBS over SBS. Over the years that I have been a proponent of and consultant in the SBS market I have had a number of discussions with both client organizations and other IT professionals who were sceptical of SBS who have cited many reasons why it was not the right solution for them. Most of those reasons were actually myths, but a few concerns were valid, such as having all of your services and applications residing on a single server, including Active Directory, Exchange Server, and even SQL Server and ISA Server. With EBS the initial design spreads these server roles across three servers (four in the case of the Premium Edition), with redundancy for most of the roles such as AD, Exchange, and security. EBS also includes Microsoft’s System Center Essentials, a much more robust monitoring and management solution than SBS.
For organizations with even twenty users who require 100% uptime, greater security designed on industry best practices, as well as a much more robust management features they should really take a good look at EBS because these features in EBS really take off where SBS’s end.
For a lot of these reasons the EBS environment will look a lot more like the enterprise than it will an SMB, at least from the back-end perspective. To the end user I don’t think I have ever heard an SBS client complain that they were lacking features or functionality, and indeed have often lauded SBS-native features such as the Remote Web Workplace. Having followed much of the planning and development process of the new mid-market offering I am glad that EBS offers these same benefits so that a company choosing EBS can still benefit from these great UX features.
<MA> With the release of EBS 2008 could this signal an end to the SBS product – essentially watering down the EBS product to fit the traditional needs of a small business?
I don’t see that happening. As an industry participant I think that there are a great many people – MVPs, SBSCs, and simple IT pros – who are very comfortable having a product that they can call their own, and not have to ‘share’ with the big boys. One of my favourite new products recently has been Windows Home Server (WHS), which is essentially a watered-down release of SBS 2003 R2. That is how the product was born and I do not see that changing with the next version. With SBS being one of Microsoft’s most popular server packages I don’t see it disappearing very quickly.
As an industry observer (and this is pure speculation) what I could see happening with SBS over the course of the next two or three product releases is the current ‘traditional’ infrastructure evolving into a next-generation build based on a Hyper-V virtualization model, with the parent partition running Server Core, and all of the the traditional roles of the product being segregated within the same physical box but in multiple OS instances installed as child partitions, but still managed from a central console so as not to complicate the burden of the SBS server administrator.
<MA> I currently manage several SBS 2003 networks. What benefits or reasons do I have to upgrade my clients to SBS 2008?
Actually let me correct your phraseology. There is no upgrade path from SBS 2003 to SBS 2008 for the simple reason that SBS 2003 existed strictly as a 32-bit (x86) environment, whereas SBS 2008 will be strictly a 64-bit (x64) system. That being said, it is easy to look at the migration as a huge expense for little gain. That would be wrong on both counts.
Firstly SBS 2003 is based on technology which is really close to nine years old – Windows Server 2003 was an upgrade of Windows 2000 Server which released in 1999. SBS 2008 is based on Windows Server 2008, a new product that may have a lot of the same look and feel of Server 2003, but was written from the ground up, and based on the same solid OS kernel as Windows Vista. We live in a much different world than the one we lived in nine years ago, and if you were to ask ten IT professionals and ten business decision makers (BDMs) what were the two most important features they demanded in a server, likely nine of them would list security and stability in the top two choices. The new kernel was designed with security in mind, and although it was possible to secure a Windows Server 2003 system, it was not as intuitive as the newer release. the new kernel is also the most stable that Microsoft has released in over a decade, with fewer crashes and hiccups, and a impressive compartmentalization method of mitigating whatever crashes may occur.
As well, it is not a secret that computer hardware – even servers – have a reliable life span of under four years. After that the TCO (total cost of ownership) goes up while the ROI (return on investment) drops. Companies with servers that are three years or older have already amortized the cost and are no longer getting the taxable benefits of their server, but still have to worry about them failing. With a three-year-old hard drive (and fan and memory and CPU…) the question is no longer IF it will fail, but when. We all know the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In IT that is an understatement to say the least – implementing a new server alongside the old gives us the advantage of doing it on our terms – our timelines, our pace, and such. Installing a new server after the old one has crashed is a rushed and harried affair that explains why consultants who wait for catastrophe have more grey hairs than I do, and fewer overall. From the time an existing server fails you would have to price and purchase and receive and build the new server, get it installed and ready to go while everyone in the organization is complaining that they do not have access to e-mail, files, intranet sites, and often VoIP, all the while praying that the latest backup of the now defunct server worked, and was not a week old.
To wrap that up as an actual answer to the question, if you sold your customer a server eighteen months ago you may hold off on discussing SBS 2008 for as much as a year. However most consultants that I know have a number of clients running three, four, and five year old servers should really start having the conversation now. Even at a year to eighteen months it might now be a bad idea to start planting the idea by having the initial conversation, outlining some of the benefits of SBS 2008, and for the larger customers possibly looking at migrating up to the new EBS offering. You’d be surprised at how many BDMs and TDMs (technical decision makers) in companies with fifty employees will hear about EBS and start making plans for the future migration.
<MA> Wow… you have really given this a lot of thought, and given me and hopefully our readers greater insight into what the new products are, what the differences are between them, as well as how to how to manage the risk and expansion. Most of us have had a few years to get used to SBS… How would you summarize for the average BDM and TDM what Essential Business Server can offer them?
It’s actually quite simple… Looking at the offerings from the point of view of a certified IT professional, EBS is what SBS probably should have been, especially for organizations with security and growth issues. Whereas SBS is a great solution for a small business, EBS offers businesses – small and medium – the tools to work now, as well as the tools to grow and expand with greater peace of mind. There is a cost to it, but the redundancy can actually save businesses money. Several years ago I installed an SBS environment for a firm in Montreal who had a staff of forty-five highly paid engineers, writers, doctors, and other professionals. One morning their server – a very reliable and not inexpensive machine – crashed… a fan which cost five dollars malfunctioned causing the server to shut down when the temperatures exceeded the safety norms. The network was down for two and a half hours – the time it took to get there, diagnose the problem, and clean the faulty fan – which translated for them to a loss of nearly three thousand dollars of employee salaries, without taking into account the revenues that were lost during that same period. EBS cannot prevent hardware from malfunctioning – nobody can. However the redundancy built into the infrastructure ensures that even when a single server goes down productivity does not grind to a halt; as well the extended monitoring capabilities of System Center Essentials would alert administrators to pending malfunctions allowing them to deal with them proactively.
<MA> Well you have certainly answered my questions… Thanks for taking the time. If I come up with any others over the course of SMB Nation 2008 this week-end I’ll pull you aside and we can continue our discussion!
Thanks for giving me the opportunity! Enjoy the conference!
Michael D. Alligood is a Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator who has a passion for community, especially revolving around certifications. He is a frequent contributor to the on-line newsgroups and forums, as well as a participant in several local user groups in northern Florida. His handicap is golf, and he has a weakness for fine sushi!