posted on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 12:53 PM
by
bradley
So how many users does it take to make a SBS network?
Do you remember the ad... “how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a toosie roll lollypop?”
...”one.... two....three...crunch” as the wise owl licking the lollypop bit into the chocolate center?
I was reminded of this in a strange way by an item from the mailbag and a post to one of the SBS listserves. First off, the question was poised.. “I have a firm with 10 to 15 users and I don't feel a “true” server is needed” and then Colby via the mailbag asks “how many uses should realistically be using SBS?” He's got it in his 5 user firm and his brother is wanting reassurance to run it in a 25 user firm.
First off, let me say that I love the Microsoft marketing machine that has brainwashed us into “everything on one box is insane” and oh we MUST have a server for every single function including handling hang nails. 10 to 15 users NEED to be in a network domain setting. To me that's a totally no brainer. I've ranted about in the past how I don't get people and their “wanting to stay in workgroup“ mentality. A domain like SBS has is just a workgroup with more toys. That's all.
Next comes the argument of us having “everything on one box“. Most of us out here don't run with our ISA server 2000 [and soon to be 2004] bare and throw a hardware router on the outside anyway or use an external hardware firewall [which should be monitored for patches, I argue] so the argument that we are insane for running our firewall on our domain controller is usually a bit muted anyway. Then the argument that we have this horrendous single point of failure when show me ANY firm out there has these single points and my sister ...who has way more servers than I do, comes home many a night saying “our server that we save our work on was down” than I do. Nowadays firms are doing what we've always done. Server consolidation. We've server consolidated so long and so well, guess who in the big server land is now stealing all of our wizards for their world. Uh huh.
How many users can realistically and COMFORTABLY use SBS I would argue these days is more dependent on what kind of pack rat of email firm you are. As I've blogged about before, we, and ALL standard Exchanges have a 16 gig limit. While SBS can legally support 75 attached computer, users, devices, whatever, the sweet spot that I've heard [per a Partner drive smart cdrom] is about 50 users, devices, whatevers. 25 is NO sweat whatsoever.
In my office I'm below that 25 and honestly I purposely really overbuy my hardware. Well this time I so overbought, Sam, my SBS 2003 Server not only is twiddling his thumbs waiting for commands, he's also snoring from the lack of stress I put on him.
The general rule of thumb is 1 or 2 gigs of ram. {I have 4 gigs, and have honestly not tweaked anything with the /3 switch and like I said, Sam the SBS 2003 server is yawning on me}.
If you are using SQL server [or plan to] you might want dual processors.
And make sure the disk drives are nice and peppy.
For the record at home we have three users on my SBS network, myself, my sister and the dog [one spoiled toy poodle].
So to answer... how many users does it take to make a SBS network?
one... two...three ....certainly. I would argue that the new “micro small firm” network that should have a SBS installed is now 5 especially for the geeky younger technology empowered folks. You WANT centralized control of antivirus, of patching, of BACKUPS. Heck even home networks need backups! The more you control from that network, the more you are in control period. SBS 2003 has the active directory gunk and weedy stuff preloaded and all you need to do is take advantage of all that power and control under the hood. And folks, us SBSers are group policy-ing just as fast or faster than our large firm counterparts.
And the maximum? I would say it truly depends on the firm. 50 most certainly and even higher than that before you hit the 75 limit, but that Exchange and how the firm works with long term storage of email may kick them to Exchange Enterprise [and get ready for a price tag sticker shock]
So to answer the question... How many users does it take to make a SBS Network......
“The world may never know.“
