What is the difference between Server 2008 R2 SBS Standard and 2011 SBS Standard?

[Naughty_Nigel]

Following on from another thread; we recently replaced our old Dell PE 1600SC server with a new Fujitsu Tx100 S3 machine, which works very well.

 

I have been running a trial of 2008 R2 Standard (not SBS) for the past two weeks, and it has been flying along. However, we installed 2011 SBS Standard at the weekend, which reduced it to a crawl, and was very unstable, with individual windows flickering on and off for a minute or so after opening them, and sometimes just hanging altogether. Upload and download speeds were also much slower at about 20 MB/second over gigabit etehrnet, compared with around 80 MB/second on Server 2008 R2. (This is all despite the machine more than meeting Microsoft's reccomended specifications.) All in all I felt as if it had been written by the Vista team.

 

A second installation was no better, so we have reverted to the 2008 R2 trial for now.

 

I am therefore considering 2008 R2 SBS Standard (rather than 2011 SBS). Does anyone have experience of this on anything less than a megaserver? (We only have a 3.1 GHz quad core Xeon and 8 GB of RAM, which was clearly not enough for 2011.)

 

From what I see it will run on 4 GB of RAM, rather than the 8GB minimum reccomended for 2011. Is it possible to select which elements are installed at installation, as the problem with 2011 seemed to be that absolutely everything was installed and activated, whether we wanted it or not.

 

(I have to say, my converstation with the helpline person at Microsoft on this matter did nothing to endear me to the oganisation.)

 

I had understood that anything which worked with 2008 R2 should also work with 2011, but this was not my experience. I could not get it to recognise my HP RDX drive, (and HP do not provide 2011 specific drivers), whilst Retrospect also failed to work properly.

 

So; what I really want to know is whether SBS 2008 R2 is as slow, bloated and unsupported as SBS 2011, or whether 2008 would be a better choice on a more modest machine?

 

NN

Edited February 24, 2012 by Naughty_Nigel
Mistakes!

[Michael]

The main difference between 2008 R2 and 2008 R2 SBS is it includes Microsoft Exchange server and SharePoint.

 

As for 2011 SBS, this is still based on 2008 R2 again with Exchange Server and SharePoint, but contains the more up-to-date versions.

 

You could argue however if you have no need for Exchange or SharePoint, just stick with 2008 R2. Windows Server 8 (Windows Server 2012) will probably be released Q4 2012 or Q1 2013.

[m25man]

SBS2011 is a great product and works fine for me and all of the clients I have installed it for however.....

 

It really doesnt work with anything less that 8Gb of RAM, is a rats nest of components and if you try and do anything other than a default installation will bite you like a hungry shark.

 

The exchange and sharepoint integration is as delicate as a snowflake and if you mess with it, it will break.

 

SBS (All versions) was created for the small VAR's to sell in to SME's that Microsoft use as a vehicle to get as many people to consume their products as possible.

 

 

It's the Marmite of the Windows Server family, I like it because once its in place the user tends to stay with it forever and in the majority of cases requires them to keep a VAR engaged to look after it anything over 10 users it starts to get messy and if you decided to install your companies line of business software on the SBS box as well you could find yourself playing with fire in a petrol soaked room....

Which is why they have another version that includes a second server license just to run your Line of Business Apps on!

 

The truth is most Small Business users are probably better off to run a vanilla 2008R2 system and buy an Office 365 subscription to take care of the Exchange/Sharepoint stuff especially if your a really small outfit as Server 2008R2 Foundation edition covers all the basics.

An exchange only 365 subscription only costs around £4 per user per month and is a lot easier to manage than an SBS box with no capital outlay!

 

I will be very surprised if they ever launch another version of SBS after 2011.

[Naughty_Nigel]

Many thanks for your very helpful replies.

 

In view of the problems we had with 2011 SBS, (and the impossibility of getting our supplier to offer a refund, or swap our unused, unregistered 2011 package for 2008 SBS), we spent yesterday evening configuring Server 2008 R2 as our permanent OS. It runs so well on our server, and needs so little in the way of resources that I really cannot see the point in complicating things.

 

(On this subject, I assume that 2008 R2 Foundation Server is just like 2008 R2 Standard, but has limitations on the number of users, memory and the number of CPU's installed? I doubt that we would use it, but I would be interested to know.)

 

As far as Exchange is concerned, we will run our old 2003 R2 SBS server alongside the new one for the time being, but for various reasons have decided to give the cloud a try.

 

I liked Server 2003 R2 SBS because we could just add what we wanted, when we wanted it, and did not have the overhead of an unnecessarily bloated OS package running 24/7. I gather that Server 8 is supposed to be much more streamlined. Let's hope so anyway.

 

Thanks again.

 

NN