I Am Digerati

I know a lot of time has past since they announced that Essential Business Server has been discontinued. I thought now would be a good time since the dust has settled to air some of my thoughts on this decision.

For some context, I've been following this product since it's first beta, code name "Centro". I've been doing SBS deployments for years beforehand and I noticed a discrepancy in "packaged" solutions going beyond 50-75 users into a standard Windows environment, and it was rough. When I had first caught wind this product would help bridge the gap between small business and mid-sized company I felt pretty excited. Maybe this will finally round out Microsoft's server solutions portfolio.

When they announced that they had discontinued the product, like most people in the EBS community I was shocked. EBS version 2 was just about to be released (no joke...it was pretty close to RTM) and the first version had done pretty well from what I heard. So I was surprised that they would stop selling it in June. There was definitely a group of people in the forums and community groups wondering what was the true cause.

The end result is the same either way I look at it though, so I took a different approach. I follow Microsoft technologies pretty closely and at the last PDC when Windows Azure was announced I asked myself a question: What does this mean for solutions I deal with? I thought about it awhile and I've come up with at least a rough forecast. Although I'm more focused on enterprise technology I'll give it a try.

Small Business Server is going to be solid for quite some time. Although I do think that the Exchange component might be ported to the cloud via Windows Azure, the simplistic packaging and value to small business is obvious. EBS...it makes sense that they discontinue. Move those people to Azure and lock in recurring revenue. Although I thought that the 3 server solution wasn't too complicated other people felt differently. And it apparently showed in the "surveys" that the EBS team took.

There will always be servers in the mid-sized company. The variable will be to what extent will they play and that will determine what will be kept.

This weekend I will be performing a wipe and load of an EBS Management server. Last month I picked up the Windows Essential Business Server 2008 Administrator's Companion book and I must say, I'm pretty happy with it.

The book is more of a mid-level overview of the process and procedures on how to do things within EBS. Lately I've been diving into the certification books so this was refreshing to have a broader product outlook. It does provide steps on how to accomplish certain procedures like a replacement mode installation, but most people who know me understand that I like detail as well.

A replacement mode installation is just what it sounds: the replacement of an EBS server role. In my case, its the Management server. You can use this installation mode when you upgrade a servers hardware or need to start from a clean installation but maintain your EBS configuration. One of the very cool aspects of EBS is that it stores the configuration of that EBS implementation inside Active Directory.

For those who haven't configured EBS yet, there are two wizards that need to be ran before integrating EBS into your environment. The Preparation Wizard and the Planning Wizard both gather information about your network and how to configure the server and store it inside AD. If a replacement mode installation is detected, WEBS Setup will use that information for self configuration. This is also how it determines that it's in replacement mode, the fact that the MMSConfiguration object exists in Active Directory.

I should remind people that replacement mode installation does not restore data, just the server and configuration into an operational state. You will need to restore user data from backups.

Hope this gives you a little insight on the replacement mode installation for EBS.

While I was supporting a client I came across an issue where one of the updates failed on the Management server in an EBS installation. Maybe failed is the wrong term to use as the update reported that it would install successfully, but the next day or so (or if you manually kick of the detection logic) that update would reappear. Strange.

Looks like this is a known issue. The update in question is the SQL Server 2005 with Advanced Services SP3 (KB955706). Turns out that on my specific installation, it had upgraded the SQL Database instance but the Reporting Services instance hadn't been updated to SP3. This is why the update is re-offered. When I attempted to install the update manually, it would stop me indicating that none of the components were able to be upgraded.

As I said before, it was a known issue. The fine folks on the EBS Team Blog have an article about it here, and my problem was resolved successfully. But why does this happen?

I was curious.

Turns out, when you launch the update, it runs the Best Practices Analyzer and notices that the ASP.NET version enabled on IIS does not allow 32-bit application pools. This is a problem as the service pack needs this enabled to upgrade the reporting services instance. It is important to remember to change this back though, as applications will use 32-bit ASP.NET and not the native 64-bit bits. Since the EBS Admin Console likes 64-bit if you don't change this setting back your console will crash.