Comments on: Why SBS 2008 is better than SBS 2003

By: Steven Barden

Steven Barden — Sat, 29 May 2010 11:39:13 +0000

A few months and a blown out instance of SBS 2003 R2 OWA access later, as well as an upgrade from 4 to 8 gigs of RAM, and I’m banging my head against that wall again. I blew up OWA and figured it may be easier to light up an archived copy of of SBS08… it’s just too painful. I have the need to turn up 5 VM’s not including SBS08. And I don’t want to reload SBS03 just to fix OWA (although I may have to if I cannot fix OWA on the current SBS03 box). I’m just so discouraged… I have to feed 4 gigs to one box and it’s still a pig. I love most MS products. Dare I say I owe Mr. Gates my physical world (cars, house, male self esteem by having stuff… still working on that one, but let’s be honest), but I cannot handle looking at the prices of bumping from 8 to 16 gigs just for this. *sigh*… bye bye SBS08 again. I sure hope they freeze the 4 gig need for the next install. Besides, all 2010 stuff is what I am really looking at, so I think 2003 will take some time to repair.

By: David Schrag

David Schrag — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:08:38 +0000

Thomas, I’m not sure what you were trying to do. Yes, SBS is supposed to be the hub of an internal network, just like any domain controller. But with a properly configured firewall it’s very accessible over the Internet.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:37:22 +0000

“http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957717″ says quite boldly:
“In any of these three scenarios, you must correct the IP address in question in order for setup to continue. The IP address of the SBS 2008 server must be located in one of the following ranges.
10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255 ”

See: “must correct”, ie. no other options to use SBS 2008 than in internal network. So much of using it “anywhere” like marketing is saying. Any standard DHCP-connection is out of the question immediately. “Anywhere” but not in Internet, essentially.

By: Mark T.

Mark T. — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:31:57 +0000

Wizards ~ Schmizards ,
Guess I’ll have to go my daughters Jr.High to get dumbed down to use this version of SBS. Overall I like the look and feel of the RWW, OWA, Exchange and Sharepoint , BUT man, what a PITA. I could have had 3 SBS2003 domains with Exchange setup in the time it took to work the bugs out for a FULLY functional SBS Domain ( with all the bells ) .

For a BASIC Domain Controller setup with a newbie administrator it would be great .
For the rest of us …. well… time will tell.

Jury is still out , but the system is not bad overall.

By: Steven Barden

Steven Barden — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:07:28 +0000

I’m shocked at this product. I was excited to try it, and now that I’m loading it on my new fancy-schmacy Quad-Core Intel 2.4+ gig Xeaon, yada yada, with a few terrabytes of mirrors, and 4 gigs of RAM, it wants all of my ram!!! I’m using VMWare 2.0, which is so-so compared to 1.0 (been using VMWare server since 2004), and I have to give SBS 4+ gigs to INSTALL! That means swapping HARD, and now I can bearly shut it down via a browser. After all that I have read, for SBS, I’m just moving over my VM from the Dell 700. I left sys-admin for .Net dev years ago, but I still play sys-work on T.V. But I’ve gotten over using betas, shiney stuff, and bottle rockets. Thank you all for your posts. I’m hard-core enough to run SBS for less than 5 people, but not THIS hard core.

By: Marcus

Marcus — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:00:30 +0000

If I was to start from scratch I would go with SBS 2003. SBS 2008 is a resource hog and unless you’ve got specific needs that can only be met via Exchange 2007 (Entourage EWS, Etc).. I would stick with 2003. Its amazing how stable and efficient SBS 2003 is compared to 2008.

By: David Schrag

David Schrag — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 03:09:39 +0000

No reason to start from scratch with SBS03. New installations should be SBS08.

By: Kar

Kar — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:50:16 +0000

I read all the posts. It is my understanding that many of you would not upgrade from sbs 03 to sbs 08.
My question is: If you were to start from scratch, in my case, I need a domain controller and an application server, would you start with sbs 03 or 08?
ps: company less than 20 users.

By: Neilos

Neilos — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:57:47 +0000

I installed sbs 2008 on a quad xeon 2.5ghz server with 8gb RAM and 3 SAS drives.

My experience of 2008 vs 2003 is like that of XP vs Vista. It achieves the same goal, but it uses more resources in the process, confuses simple configuration with attempts at idiot proofint, and it costs more.

I’m sure 2008 is advantageous for companies of 20 users+ but for smaller companies 2003 was a better product.

I’m keeping a constant eye out for an SBS alternative, MS need some competition in this market.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:14:43 +0000

Will sbs 2008 participate in a forest?