Good point, Ben. The generic Microsoft docs and whitepapers assume "mid-sized" -- whatever that means to anyone at any given moment.
They don't necessarily recognize the challenges faced by small companies, nor do they adequately address the scale needed by large enterprises. You have to talk with the right people in Microsoft to get the answers that suit your environment in those cases. Microsoft Consulting Services is useful in many of these scenarios, of course. *ASB *(My XeeSM Profile) <http://XeeSM.com/AndrewBaker> *Providing Competitive Advantage through Effective IT Leadership* On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 3:28 PM, Ben Scott <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 2:45 PM, [email protected] > <[email protected]> wrote: > > So, MS doesn't recommend a Simple Exchange Organization server solution > > unless you're running SBS or EBS? Serious? > > Short answer: You'll be fine, just deploy the single server. > > Longer answer: > > There's a constant low-intensity struggle within Microsoft between > the product and support engineers who want to say you *must* keep > everything separate, and the SBS/EBS people who say "Hey, guys, the > SMB segment is still a huge chunk of our business". This struggle > occasionally leaks out in the documentation, where the engineers say > "never do this" and the SBS people tack on "unless you're on SBS". > Not because SBS is imbued with magical server goodness; they just > don't want anyone to be able to say that "SBS doesn't comply with > Microsoft's own recommendations". > > Practical upshot: What you're doing isn't Microsoft's recommendation > for best practices, but is unlikely to be any real problem. Perhaps a > random little thing here or there won't work, but if you're a small > shop you're prolly already used to that. (Example: Exchange 2000 and > Win 2000 RIS could not co-exist on the same server without the RIS SIS > groveler puking all over itself.) > > I find one of the harder parts about being a small shop is that all > the capacity planning guides seem to assume you're dedicating servers > to everything. They're no guidance on how to plan a multi-function > server. I guess they just figure us small shops won't read the docs > anyway... :-/ > > -- Ben > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
