Windows Server Editions crash course

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Currently, my office has a single sign on domain environment i setup though a Solaris 10 server though Samba. My boss liked it and wants me to write up a proposal on moving the domain from the samba box to a true Windows Server environment. Primarly, this would be used for as a Domain and file server. No exchange, No IIS, App server would be nice, but not nessicary.

The office itself is a 20 computer environment, Right now our staff is about 20 people, but will be growing soon up to 35-40. The ammount of computers nessicary wont change, since its a 24x7 operation on 3 shifts. Load on the server should be nothing more than normal office work, occasional transfer of 500mb to 1gb files. (Network drawings, files, logs, etc.)

So my question is 2 fold: 1. What edition of Windows Server should i be looking at? I currently am eyeing either standard Windows Server 2008 or Windows Small Busniess Server 2008.
2. What kind of hardware reccomendations can you make? I would prefer a dell server, since our company gets a discount though them, but ill take any suggestions.

Thanks!
 
What needs does your office have?

You start off saying no IIS, no Exchange, but then ask if Small Business Server would be a fit. Small Business Server includes Exchange and IIS.

But don't rule out SBS...what needs does your office have? Is there any e-mail at all? Would sharing/collaboration of e-mail, contacts, calendars, be of any use? Would remote access to e-mail and desktops be of any use? Using Sharepoint for info sharing?
 
@YeOldeStonecat:
Thats my problem, I don't have enough experience with the versions to know exactly what i need and what i don't, To answer some of your questions:

Email it taken care of by a corporate exchange server, along with all associated functions. Remote access would be nice for the admins, but not for the rest of the staff. Ive heard bits and pieces about Share point, but it seems like a bit of overkill for us.

Realistically, I doubt this server would do much more than be a Active Directory PDC. Policy control, Roaming profiles, It would be nice to have patch management for the domain machines. Application server possibly also.

To explain my situation a bit more: I work in a NOC. We watch over a region of our network, so we kinda fall in this weird deadspace of IT, where divisional IT doesn't want to help us, but corporate IT is a bit too strict and too far away to effectivly manage our machines. It works out well for us, since we can have our own policies and procedures, but still have access to all the corporate tools, short of the windows AD environment they run. Right now we are just getting started and one of the projects i took on was the aforementioned Solaris 10 server. Its worked out well, short of some small headaches. The boss has liked the idea of roaming profiles, but is concerned about the future. The box is EOLed, and while we have more than enough processing power (way overkill for what we do with it) We have no room to grow when it comes to HD space.
 
If you already have a corporate email server then I wouldn't worry about sbs. Sharepoint is free and can be used with server std if you ever decide to use it. Same with WSUS for installing windows updates from the server.

I'd look at 2008 std 64bit unless you have a reason to go with 03 or 32bit versions. That way you are best prepared for the future. Make it handle AD, DNS, DHCP, etc. Install WSUS and get a managed AV solution if you don't already have one(I like eset's av personally)

As far as hardware goes is this a rack server or a tower that you need?

My company generally installs dell poweredge 2900 servers if space isn't an issue. Look at one of them with a single quad core(dual quads if you want more expansion), 4 gigs of ram, dual power supplies, drac card(remote management card that can really come in handy), etc. I'd personally look at running dual SAS arrays. A raid 1 with like 2 73 gig drives for the os(or 146 gigs for a few bucks more) and 4 drives in a raid 5 for data.

As far as backup software goes you might be ok with the built in software using a hard drive based solution like the dell rd1000. We generally use LTO2 drives(or higher if they need more room for backup) with backup exec.
 
If you have a corporate exchange server upstream then I would definately stay away from SBS server. Go get Server 2008 Standard x64. Go grab a server with a quad-core Xeon and 8GB of RAM for longevity, it's so cheap right now, might as well. Then you can use Hyper-V to setup some test machines if you want to simply separate out roles or whatever. Make sure you get a good RAID card that supports SAS and has at least 256MB of cache with a battery for expansion purposes. I would start with 3x 146GB SAS drives. The nice thing with the good RAID card is you can add drives later and expand your array onto the new drives without losing data or even downing the server. Setup a 40GB OS partition and the rest for your Data partition. Setup the user shares and other crap on the data partition. Dell works well but I generally recommend HP servers since they are just engineered better (IMO) and the HP SmartStart works so well for deploying a server, especially if you don't have much experience.
 
vanilla server 03 or 08 with enough cals.

run AD, DNS, DHCP, File/Print Sharing, any application shraring.

configure folder redirector for my docs and desktop and be done.

easy setup

if you need dell server come to me =) Poweredge 2900 III would be my choice for that number of users.

Raid 1/Raid 5 with Perc 6i and SAS drives.

Probably come in around 4-6grand depending on what you wnt to do for backup drive.
 
Awesome, thanks for the insight guys! Its a rackmount environment, and it seems like i was pretty close to my guesses when it came to hardware requirements.

Time to get a evaluation of the basic server 08 and play with it in a test environment.
 
marley1 said:
vanilla server 03 or 08 with enough cals.

run AD, DNS, DHCP, File/Print Sharing, any application shraring.

configure folder redirector for my docs and desktop and be done.

easy setup

if you need dell server come to me =) Poweredge 2900 III would be my choice for that number of users.

Raid 1/Raid 5 with Perc 6i and SAS drives.

Probably come in around 4-6grand depending on what you wnt to do for backup drive.
Click to expand...

Yea that sounds about right. Might be a little more again depending on backup.

Make sure OP you get a drac card. With one of these servers OP you will have 3 network connections. 1 for the management card and 2 standard nics. You can team the nics for failover which is nice. FYI the drivers dell installs via the openmanage cd don't support this. You have to download them from dells site(not sure why they do this).

The 2900 III does come in a rack mount version. If you can spare the U's it is a good choice. If not maybe a 2950 with 2.5 inch sas drives.
 
didn't see need for rackmount, 2950 = pimp daddy.

i did that guy with dual 2.66ghz quad core xeon, 8gb ddr2, sbs 08, rd1000, max 2.5 146gb sas raid1/raid5/hotspare.

/me hasn't seen the need for the drac cards before, but i usually just go to the client.
 
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