Thursday, September 18, 2008

Adding Servers to your SBS 2008 Network

Many people think that Windows SBS networks can only have one Domain Controller. Let me set the record straight right now.

All versions of Small Business Server can have any number of additional servers, and even additional domain controllers.  SBS only has to hold the FSMO roles.  With the new SBS 2008 Premium edition, the second server can be used as a domain controller, or you can add any number of servers.  The Premium edition of SBS 2008 is just another copy of Windows Server, a cheaper version, to get you started on your server farm.

All the copies of SBS, you can add any number of servers that you want!


16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does SBS 2008 (or EBS 2008, for that matter) support running SQL Server Enterprise Edition on a second server? If we have an existing Windows Server 2008 license for the second box, can we just get the Standard version of SBS 2008? We are in the final stages of a two-year custom software development project and find that the CDC feature in the Enterprise Edition is going to make licensing that edition cheaper than developing our own audit history tracking.

Sean Daniel said...

If you have a copy of Server, and a copy of SQL Enterprise, you can absolutely run that on a server in either SBS 2003 or SBS 2008 network.

If you only have a copy of SQL Enterprise, you could buy premium to get your second copy of Windows Server cheaper than full price, and run SQL Enterprise on that.

This is totally supported, you just have to buy the additional software, as our premium version comes with SQL Standard.

Anonymous said...

Does SBS 2008 allow for trust relationships ?

Ben said...

Are there any problems with having a Windows 2003 domain controller on an SBS 2008 network?

Sean Daniel said...

Nope, have at it.

Anonymous said...

I have purchsed 2 x sbs 2008 Standard editions.

Can I use one to run as a back-up server of the first? I am currently only running 1 - but would like to add the other and replicate the first server.

I have installed sbs 2008 onto xenserver 5.5

any suggestions please?

Sean Daniel said...

you cannot run SBS as a backup server, you'll need to get a standard server, and manually promote it to a domain controller as a backup server.

you could run backups and have hte backup server offline, then if the other server goes down, restore it quickly to the new identitcal hardware.

wlhancher said...

Can you install a SBS 2008 onto an existing Win2008 Standard Server that is already running as the DC? We want to use it soley for the mail.

Sean Daniel said...

Hi WLHancher,

Yes you can install SBS 2008 into a standard environment, however, you must make SBS2008 the primary DC and the Global Catalog. This means that if your other server 2008 is a domain controller, you'd need to make it a BDC. So basically SBS 2008 will take over the network and you can join the WinSrv2008 to the SBS domain and continue to work.

Hope that helps.

wlhancher said...

Thank you!

Lennox said...

Do you mean it must be SBS 2008 Premium in order to have second Win 2008 R2 DC? We are in the process to move into O365, and need to setup ADFS for single sign on, but ADFS do NOT work with SBS 2008. Your help is much appreciated.

Sean Daniel said...

SBS 2008 Premium does not have to be used to pu ta secondary DC in the network, you can use ANY Windows server sku you like, but you get a discount with the Premium offering (if you also want SQL). So you can use any server you want.

Are you sure ADFS 2.0 doesn't work with SBS 2008? My understanding is it does.

Anonymous said...

Actually i would need to know can i install windows 2008 as a backup domain controller in exiting sbs2008 environment..

Mean,

I have sbs2008 as a domain controller and now i will install another windows 2008 standard edition as a second server for backup, if domain controller goes down then user can login with second server, also i need to install sql server 2008 r2 edition on it, i purchased windows server 2008 R2 + sql server 2008 R2 license already.

Sean Daniel said...

Yep that works fine, but with client cached logons, I'm not sure why this is needed. You can add whatever server you want in whatever roll you want to an SBS domain. but, the SBS server must be the primary domain controller (ie, has the FSMO roles)

rdp said...

ok i have promote server 2008 r2 Standard as an Additional Domain Controller but as per your instruction i have to configure "client cached logons" where i find this option ?
can you give me detail step please ?

Sean Daniel said...

clients do this automatically, same as if you take your laptop home for the night you can still log in while the domain controller isn't in your house. :)