Review: Sneak Peek at Microsoft Essential Business Server 2008 RC0, Part I

Microsoft Tuesday released the new Essential Business Server 2008 RC0 to the public, and the new server has been designed from the ground up. It's aim: to serve mid-sized companies that are not adequately staffed to work with enterprise software.

According to Microsoft, there is a huge need for midmarket network management and productivity software. Companies that are growing rapidly have no choice but to buy some enterprise products or find ways to extend appliances to meet their needs. There has been no middle ground, the folks at Microsoft say.

After taking a look at this offering, we don't agree entirely with the challenge Microsoft is presenting. There are a plethora of technologies, productivity software and dedicated network appliances to choose from nowadays. In fact, Essential may be a bit late finding a niche in a somewhat bloated software market.

But as far as niche, Microsoft has outsmarted many established competitors before, so it will be interesting to see if the midmarket is truly ready for EBS. One key advantage EBS has over competing products -- and this is very significant -- is the way it automates management of its services and server software.

Like Small Business Server 2008, Microsoft divided Essential Business Server (EBS) into a Standard and Premium Edition. EBS Premium Edition fills the enterprise gap by including SQL Server for line of business applications. Microsoft divided the EBS into three distinct servers -- Management, Messaging and Security. The three servers combined come with a price of $5,472 and support 300 users or devices.

EBS comes integrated with core networking, Exchange, Active Directory, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server. The software servers are distributed across the three EBS servers. EBS servers are bundled on four separate discs. Before embarking on a lengthy review of EBS and all of its niceties, reviewers focused on installing the servers and all of the issues related with installation on complex networks.

Overall, VARs may very much like what Microsoft accomplishes with EBS -- even with some stumbling blocks.

Because of its potentially broad impact on the channel, we're going to break up this review into two parts. This part will focus on installation.

The Test Center got a sneak peek at the three EBS servers running on an IBM BladeCenter S. Reviewers started with a pre-installed version of EBS for all three servers. Like SBS, installing EBS is straightforward. Microsoft created a simple wizard to configure the server. EBS creates an Active Directory (AD) forest if one doesn't exist.

The installation needs to run in sequential order. The management server needs to be in place before the security server and the messaging server runs. While EBS does a good job at simplifying some installation steps, the management server forces administrators to select names for the Management, Security and Messaging servers. The names cannot be changed.

EBS does not allow administrators to go back and review steps in non-sequential order. During the initial installation steps, the wizard asks to choose between DHCP and static IP. If administrators choose DHCP for testing and later want to change the internal servers to static, they're stuck. Moreover, if administrators stop the installation process, they cannot restart the process with the same installation. They have to start the process from scratch. Ouch.

The EBS security server arrives with Microsoft's Forefront Management Gateway. Once in place, the Security server acts a firewall. The Security server generates an internal IP and routes external IPs through its gateway. The internal IP, however, gets created during the Management server setup. During the installation we encountered a problem setting up an internal IP that we could not resolve. After connecting to AD, the security server could not resolve an IP conflict with the Test Center's DHCP server.

In lab testing, we released the IP but were still stuck because we could not go back and change the setting in the Management Server. What's more, we stopped the Security server installation, so we were forced to install the OS and server from scratch. EBS does not provide a way to restart the installation without the operating system.

Administrators will find the installation challenging, especially if they try to do it remotely, even with a sophisticated blade server at their disposal. We recommend inspecting IPs on the network so that external DHCP servers don't create such conflicts. In part two, we will be discussing configuration of all three servers, including management of all modules.

But the bottom line: The Test Center is recommending this product because it simplifies management of multiple products so much -- once you get past the installation.