Microsoft knew it was onto a good thing when SBS 2003 took the market by storm. Bundling its most popular and necessary server applications together in one integrated package proved to be a winning formula.

The challenge, however, lay in scalability. The upper limit for SBS 2003 is 75 users, but the reality is that having Windows Server 2003, SharePoint, Exchange 2003, ISA 2004 and possibly SQL Server 2005 all running on one box serving that many users really isn’t a good idea.

So Microsoft looked to bundling again, but this time aiming for the “mid-market,” from 25 to 300 users. Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (EBS), formerly known as Centro, was the result.

The mid-market is different to the small business market in one important aspect: there’s usually some kind of in-house IT staff, whereas in the small business market IT is most often outsourced.

The IT person(s) in the medium business might have full time or part time IT responsibility but they’re not specialists, they’re generalists. And their boss demands the same functionality and reliability from their IT assets as their enterprise brethren.

Standard or Premium Service, Sir?

EBS 2008 comes in two flavours: Standard and Premium. Standard gives you three servers (or rather the software for three; we’re sure the major server vendors will pick up the ball and sell turnkey packages). The first is the Management Server, running Windows Server 2008 Standard and Systems Center Essentials 2007. Second is the Messaging Server, running Windows Server 2008 Standard, Exchange 2007 Standard and Forefront for Exchange. Finally, there’s the Security Server, which lives at the edge of the network and runs Windows Server 2008 Standard, the Edge role in Exchange 2007 and Forefront Threat Management Gateway (the new version of ISA Server).

The Premium edition adds a fourth server running Windows Server 2008 Standard and SQL Server 2008 Standard.
All Windows Server 2008 are x64 edition, partly to support Exchange 2007, which is 64-bit only, and partly to comfortably support more than 4 GB of RAM.

Medium Iron?

The minimum recommended hardware specifications are an x64 CPU, 4 GB of RAM for the Management and Messaging server, 2 GB for the Security Server, and disk space for all of them, ranging from 50 to 100 GB. Two network cards are required for the Security Server because it acts as the gateway to the internet.

But these are only the bare minimums; realistically, if you have, say, 200 users you’d need a lot more RAM, 8-12 GB and a lot more disk space, especially on the Messaging Server. If you give each user a small 1 GB mailbox quota (2 GB isn’t unheard of today), you’d need at least 350-400 GB disk space in a fast RAID setup.

Playing nicely with the other children?

Unlike SBS, where installations generally consist of upgrading workgroup networks (or upgrading from earlier SBS versions), EBS will end up in existing infrastructures. The requirements for these are fairly simple: at least one domain controller (and the Schema master and at least one Global Catalogue server) must be running Windows Server 2003 SP1/2 or Windows Server 2008. The minimum level of DCs is Windows 2000 SP4 or later, and the domain level must be either Windows 2000 native or 2003. The AD schema will be updated to the 2008 level during installation. This is the scenario where EBS actually holds your hand during the transition, of course EBS can be slotted into any existing environment with more manual work involved.

EBS will not allow trusts with other AD forests, and it must be the root of the network forest with no child domains.
As far as network topology goes, EBS will run in a single subnet setup, as well as in routed networks with WAN / VPN links.

Always Prepared?

One of the worst kept secrets in the Microsoft world has been two wizards that’ll come with EBS: the Preparation Wizard and the Planning Wizard. The Preparation wizard will be available as a free download, and considering the breadth of its testing I’m sure it’ll be very popular. Especially with consultants not looking to upgrade to EBS but simply wanting to check the “health” of their Windows infrastructure. The Planning wizard (being EBS specific) will only be available on the EBS media.



Only available for us to test in pre beta code, we ran the Preparation Wizard on an existing SBS 2003 SP1 installation with interesting results (see screenshot below).  We found errors in DNS configuration, unspecified sites and subnets, missing service packs, and several others. It also checks AD, DHCP and NICs for erroneous configuration, as well as using the Exchange Best Practise Analyser (BPA) to thoroughly size up your existing Exchange environment.



Be aware that the wizard doesn’t allow you to proceed to the Planning Wizard until all errors have been attended to.
The wizard presents its results in the UI with the option of creating an HTML report.

Successful Installations start with a Plan  

After all the issues flagged by the Preparation Wizard are dealt with, the Planning Wizard gathers information about your current network. It will identify if you’re upgrading from SBS 2003, for instance, and offer specifics on how to accomplish this (see below).




The choice to keep your existing firewall appliance / server or replace it with the Security server in EBS is also made here



As are the names and IP addresses for the new servers.



All this information is stored in AD at the end of the wizard, and the Installation Wizard will pick it up when you start installing the EBS servers.

I found the wizard helpful in guiding me through the planning for the upgrade, as well as making sure I covered all areas where I needed to check configuration settings.

A Lengthy Installation

Getting this puppy up and running is a time consuming task, taking at least a day, if not two. I really hope there will be an OEM pre-installation kit similar to what’s available for SBS today, so that the servers can come “pre-baked”.

An excellent Installation wizard takes over once the base Windows Server OS has been installed, and guides you through every step of the way.



It continues its tasks on the second server, including helping you join it to the domain, and does the same on the last server.



 It also installs each component application, such as Exchange on the messaging server and SCE on the management server.



If anything goes awry on the second or third server and you have to start from scratch, the installation wizard will detect previous actions taken and undo domain joins and DC promotions automatically – kudos to Microsoft for including this.



Both the Management and Messaging server are domain controllers allowing for redundancy in case of server failures (the Achilles heel of SBS).

Once the installation of all three servers is complete, the Installation Wizard helps with configuring Site to Site VPN links, firewall rules and migrating existing DNS and DHCP services to EBS. It also aids in migrating Exchange mailboxes, user logon scripts and profiles, moving AD FSMO roles to EBS, and installing SharePoint Services.

The Administration Console

Microsoft wins the hearts of IT people with easy-to-use interfaces. EBS is no exception, offering a new, tab-based integrated UI for all common tasks. Things you can do in the Administration Console without having to open other management tools are create user accounts, assign CALs, allocate Exchange mailboxes, work with distribution lists and security groups, and redirect Documents / My Documents folders to the server.

System Health tab gives instant status for key network functions such as AD, NIC configurations, Exchange status and firewall status. The Security tab, on the other hand, lets you know about antivirus and anti-spam status, as well as what’s happening with recent security updates.




The next tab lets you see software updates for computers, install agents on devices, and manage computers.



The Users and Groups tab, not surprisingly, lets you create user and group accounts, as well as manage distribution groups in Exchange.

Licenses of course, handles CALs and associated tasks; the Extensibility tab is for third party developers to insert their add-ins, split into System Applications and Business Applications.



For remote management, there’s an interesting twist in EBS: each server accepts up to six simultaneous remote administration (RDP) sessions, up from the standard two in vanilla Windows Server.

Flash your licence

As with SBS, one of the goals of EBS is to simplify licence management. When you buy EBS you get the three server licences (four if you choose Premium). Pricing for Standard is set at US $5472 through Open licensing and Premium comes in at US $ 7163; both come with five CALs included. 

Each device or user also needs a CAL to access the features of EBS, but unlike the separate products from Microsoft, where a CAL would be needed for each product (Exchange etc), this CAL covers everything.

A Standard CAL is US $ 81 and a Premium CAL is US $ 195. Only users who need to access SQL Server 2008 need the Premium CAL; others can use the Standard CAL, even in an EBS premium environment.

Overall, this is a saving of around 30% compared with buying each product separately.

Just as in SBS, CALs are tracked (in Windows Server it’s more of a trust relationship between your business and Microsoft), but unlike SBS 2003, licences are assigned to individual users or devices (your choice).  If someone leaves the company, it’s easy to reassign the CAL; there’s also a temporary buffer if licence needs suddenly go over the limit.

Do you really want just one box?

I must say I was surprised to see a white paper from Microsoft on how to virtualise EBS. We’re not talking about training or demonstration environments here, but actual production setups.

The hardware requirements are hefty: you’d need at least a quad core, preferably a dual quad core setup, with 16 GB or more of RAM (12 is minimum), plenty of RAID storage in separate arrays for each VM, and at least two NICs. The white paper talks about Hyper-V as the platform, but any other virtualisation software should work, as long as it supports x64 guests. When installing EBS in this manner, I was pleased to find that Integration Services (formerly known as Virtual Machine additions) were installed automatically.




The main reason to virtualise an EBS environment would be high availability and backup. If you used two Hyper-V boxes running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Core and had a small SAN, the result would be an extremely resilient data centre. Add to that the ability to backup each VM easily, and this would be attractive to a mid sized business. With the improvements to fail over clustering in Windows Server 2008, the two boxes could even be geographically separated, although in that case you’d need to add a data replication technology instead of the SAN.

Managed IT to the Max

When I reviewed Systems Center Essentials 2007 (SCE) (APC, January 2007) it was a product that I raved about. The tie in of monitoring, software and patch deployment, alerting, and deep technical knowledge in Management Packs into one comprehensive console is a very powerful “window” (pun intended) into the status of your environment.



So it’s not surprising to see SCE implemented in EBS, as it’s the sweet spot business size for SCE. Larger environments use System Center Operations Manager 2007. SCE will also interface with SNMP devices such as routers and switches.

Mail the Exchange Way

Today’s businesses live on email and if it’s down, you’ll hear about it quick smart. Exchange 2007 delivers several benefits to EBS, the first being the new Edge server role. This role lives on the Security server and filters incoming email for malware through Forefront for Exchange, as well as filtering spam using the Intelligent Message Filter (IMF).

The messaging server runs the other roles in Exchange 2007, such as Client Access and Hub transport. The former provides access to mail and calendars from web browsers (Outlook Web Access) and POP3 and IMAP clients.

The other big kahuna in Exchange 2007 is Unified Messaging, where you link Exchange to the phone system, either a modern VoIP system or a legacy traditional system. This allows incoming faxes to be delivered as a message in your Inbox, and if you don’t answer your phone, the resulting message will also be delivered to your Inbox. Further, it lets you call your Exchange server from anywhere with an ordinary phone and have your emails and calendar information read to you over the phone, and you can delete messages etc. I suspect system integrators will sell EBS with this feature bundled and ready to go.

Antivirus is also taken care of, with a one year subscription to Forefront which runs on both the Messaging server and the Edge server.

Remote Workers

One of the best loved features of SBS is Remote Web Workplace, which allows easy remote access to Outlook Web Access (OWA), SharePoint and the desktop of the office computer (through RDP). This is also provided in EBS, as well as traditional VPN access catering for roaming remote users (sales people with laptops) and “work from home” setups.

EBS - a hit?

Apart from hassles during the installation (more due to Hyper-V than failings in EBS), my experience with EBS was a positive one.

The target audience for this product is a lot smaller than the small business market, but still a lot bigger than the enterprise market. Mid market companies often have a more mature attitude to IT than small businesses, and many will see the value of this bundle. Now it’s up to Microsoft to follow up by educating its partners about EBS so that they can sell it, as well as marketing directly to this segment.

Whether EBS will carve out as big a share of the market as SBS remains to be seen; after all, there’s more competition, as well as integration issues with Linux servers and clients, and Mac clients. These issues are rare in the small business space, but more common in the mid market. The big benefits that come with EBS are of course all the strong technologies in Windows Server 2008: Backup, NAP, Remote Apps, TS Gateway, security, IIS 7 and so forth.

Overall, for a business that’s ready for an infrastructure upgrade, EBS is the right product, technically as well as financially.

Paul Schnackenburg is a small business IT consultant and teacher.