SCE Support on SBS 2003 SP1 / R2 - Good Idea??
I have spent some time this week installing System Center Essentials 2007 on SBS 2003 SP1 / R2 with some interesting conclusions, lets go on the journey.
The first go through I installed an SBS 2003 R2 Standard Edition Server on VMware Server.
I created the base server with:
- 127GB IDE disk,
- 3096MB RAM and
- (initially) a single NIC
Once I had documented the Single NIC Build I added a Second NIC to emulate the very popular Windows Firewall behind a Broadband Router configuration (SCE Computer details shown on the right).
In both configurations for Standard Edition I found no reason why this would not be a very useful management tool 
I would be much less keen to add this workload to Premium Edition, in fact the the same build as my Standard Edition Virtual Machines I have had more than one Blocking Error and still do not have a stable build.
I will not post these until I have fixes, I am still collecting data and will ask for help on the Managed Forums to see if there are resolutions to these installation blocks.
So for today I think SCE 2007 on SBS Standard edition with 4GB of RAM is something I am very happy to deploy, especially if the rumour of Service Pack 1 having much lower memory requirements are true.
BUT even if the Installation blocking issues are easy to resolve I'm not too sure I would want to add SCE 2007 to a machine that runs...
- Exchange 2003
- WSUS 2.0
- WSS 2.0
- WSS 3.0 <--- Very common SBS Community Additional Install
- ISA Server
- SQL 2005 Work Group
- Trend Micro CSM for SMB 3.6 <--- Doesn't everyone run Trend?
Best Practice so far:
System Center Essentials 2007 on SBS 2003 R2 Standard Edition? Give it a try looks to me as a definite future up and comer especially in SBS (Next) and Windows Essential Business Server.
System Center Essentials on SBS 2003 R2 Premium Edition? I really do think a Windows 2003 R2 Standard Edition Server to act as a management Server will be the best solution or you may have some pain. Plus if you remove WSUS from the SBS Server in favour of the SCE 2007 Server you get back a few cycles and a bit of RAM to let you serve a few more users.