Wednesday 19 November 2008

SBS 2008 Training Comes to Stockport

After seeing heavily subsidised SBS 2008 training being offered in such places as the US, Canada and Australia I raised the question with Emily Lambert at the SBS 2008 launch event in Manchester.  Emily asked me to drop her a mail with examples of this training, which I duly did and copied in our friendly MS PAL, Vijay.

It turned out a number of people had raised this with Emily and in early November they came up trumps with a 3 day workshop in London for only £200. After consulting my heavily pregnant wife we agreed it was worth the time away from home and I booked my spot. Unfortunately the demand had been so high all the places had gone and I’d been put on the waiting list.

Meanwhile Ric from NetLink IT had been musing over the fact that the only offering was in London and wondered out loud to Emily if we could have some further North.  I obviously backed this whole heartedly, not only because I didn’t have a place on the course, but it’s always nicer to be closer to home for these events.

Last night I was catching up on my blog roll and discovered Microsoft had come up trumps again with new courses announced across the country.

Course Title: 44CO101 - Implementing and Administering Windows® Small Business Server 2008

Location

Date

Duration

London 01/12/08 3 days
London 12/01/09 2 days
Edinburgh 15/01/09 2 days
Stockport 16/02/09 2 days
Birmingham 19/02/09 2 days

My booking is confirmed and paid for, I hope to see some of you there.

Monday 17 November 2008

Single CAL Open License Confirmed

Typical, that on the same day I blog about a missing part number, my question is answered. I’m not complaining though, I always thought it was just an oversight. I’ve updated my spreadsheet with the missing part number (6UA-02673) and many thanks to Emily Lambert for confirming the information.  And just to confirm how complicated MS licensing can be, here are all the part numbers for what is basically the same product:

6UA-02656          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP C Device CAL

6UA-02670          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP NL Device CAL

6UA-02671          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP C User CAL

6UA-02673          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP NL User CAL

6UA-02750          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Lic/SA Pack OLP NL GOVT Device CAL

6UA-02751          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Lic/SA Pack OLP NL GOVT User CAL

6UA-02752          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste SA OLP NL GOVT Device CAL

6UA-02753          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste SA OLP NL GOVT User CAL

6UA-02754          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 OLP NL GOVT Device CAL

6UA-02755          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 OLP NL GOVT User CAL

6UA-02542          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP B AE Device CAL

6UA-02543          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP NL AE Device CAL

6UA-02544          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP B AE User CAL

6UA-02658          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP NL Device CAL

6UA-02659          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP C User CAL

6UA-02661          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP NL User CAL

6UA-02662          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP C Device CAL

6UA-02664          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP NL Device CAL

6UA-02665          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP C User CAL

6UA-02667          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP NL User CAL

6UA-02668          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP C Device CAL

6UA-02545          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl Lic/SA Pack OLP NL AE User CAL

6UA-02546          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP B AE Device CAL

6UA-02547          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP NL AE Device CAL

6UA-02548          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP B AE User CAL

6UA-02549          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste Sngl SA OLP NL AE User CAL

6UA-02550          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP B AE Device CAL

6UA-02551          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP NL AE Device CAL

6UA-02552          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP B AE User CAL

6UA-02553          Windows Small Bus CAL Ste 2008 Sngl OLP NL AE User CAL

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Friday 14 November 2008

Single CALs? Great. But Where’s the Open License Option?

From a costs point of view one of the biggest changes with the new version of SBS is the availability of single CALs. With SBS 2003 the minimum purchase was five, so if you had a customer with six users they would have to buy ten CALs.  For budget conscious customers this wasn’t the greatest piece of news when discussing implementing SBS.

The initial minimum purchase is still the five CALs that ship with SBS Standard or Premium, but after that you can switch to purchasing single CALs. When drawing up a reference spreadsheet of the various part numbers for SBS 2008 and CAL options, I stumbled across a missing piece. I found the part numbers for single CALs in Open Value License (OVL), FPP and OEM, but not Open License (OL).

Previously we’ve almost always sold OEM, but we’re now shifting towards Open Licenses to enable transfer rights, which in turn also allows our new DR plan to work. OVL is one option but has the added cost of Software Assurance (SA) which I don’t see the value in as SBS 2008 isn’t going to be replaced in the next 3 years.  Saying that there is one good reason to sell OVL and that’s the split payment option – a customer can pay for the licenses over 3 years, instead of up front and there’s no added cost, in effect 0% APR.

So unless a customer wants to split their payments, we’re going to be offering OL, but now we run into the problem that there doesn’t seem to be a single CAL license option…  Surely this is just an oversight on MS’s part, but so far my questions to them about it via Eric Ligman and Emily Lambert remain unanswered…

I’ll keep looking and add an update here if I find anything, but if anyone else already knows the answer I’d love to hear it.

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Wednesday 12 November 2008

Time to Migrate to SBS 2008

Today is the official launch of Windows Essential Server Solutions, which to you and me really means Small Business Server 2008.  Here at Sirona Solutions we’ve been running the beta for some time, but not as our production server.  We’re now recommending SBS 2008 to potential new customers, so it’s definitely time to start using it on a daily basis.  So what’s holding us back?  Lack of disk space and memory… 

We run our production servers on a Dell PE2950 running VMWare ESX 3.5 and it’s been an excellent solution.  Unfortunately what was a very decent spec just over a year ago, is now not enough to add a fourth virtual server. All eight memory slots are full (8 x 1Gb) and to upgrade it you have to remove the lot. Eight lots of 2Gb is expensive enough, but looking forward perhaps the even more expensive option of 4 x 4Gb would be better, leaving four slots free for further expansion. As for the disk space, I’m hoping VMWare support are going to be able to help me clear up some files to enough room.

Once we get past the problem of upgrading the server, the business of actually migrating comes up. Microsoft have released the official migration document and Jamie Burgess has a few useful pointers on his blog too. VMWare has the great feature of Snapshots which allow you to take a point-in-time image which you can revert back to in seconds. I’ve used this in previous major software changes and it’s like having the undo feature in Word and the value is even greater in a migration scenario.

Vijay has posted some good notes on his experience of upgrading and I’ll be sure to do the same when we move over. Has anyone else already done the deed?

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Friday 7 November 2008

Symantec Backup Exec Road Show

I’m sat in Birmingham New Street station waiting for my train back to Stockport to leave.  I travelled down this morning for Symantec’s Backup Exec Road Show and it was certainly worth the trip. I haven’t used Backup Exec since my corporate days, but recent research has shown it’s still considered the backup software to use and we’re preparing a new backup strategy to offer to our customers.  Alongside this strategy is a disaster recovery option and that was my main reason for attending the road show today.

Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR) is a very impressive piece of software for, surprisingly enough, recovering your system. It’s basically an imaging solution with support for incremental backups.  So you do one big image of your system to an internal drive, USB device, NAS box or even an FTP server (really needs to be local). Once that big image is done you can then schedule incrementals, which means your image is kept up to date while the backup times are kept to a minimum. In the event of a disaster rendering your server inoperable you boot your standby server from a PE boot CD, point at the image and within an hour your standby server is running just like your original.

Recovery to dissimilar hardware as above is one option, but what if you don’t even want to wait an hour? BESR also gives you the option to create virtual images of your production server, giving you a VMDK file for VMWare or the Hyper-V equivalent (note to self, must read up on Hyper-V). Incrementals are supported again, so you do that one big backup and then just run an incremental each night/hour/minute, whatever your preference. Then in the event of a disaster you turn up to site with your loan server already running VMWare/Hyper-V, copy over the virtual image file and have the server up and running in ten or fifteen minutes!

Finally another great use for BESR is one that Mr Richard Tubb of Netlink-IT highlighted. He recently migrated a customer to a new server and instead of following MS’s published and painful documentation (I have first hand experience of the pain) or even a swing migration, Ric just used BESR. Using the first scenario I outlined, he booted from the PE disk and loaded up the image, less than an hour later the customer was migrated! Compare that to the two days I spent migrating a customer using MS’s method, I know which I’ll do in the future.

Now, lets see if I can publish this while sat at Wolverhampton station!