Hi,

We are doing a proposal for a medium size customer for a new email system. I've been looking at Exchange (hosted and onsite) and EBS. I worked out the pricing and it comes very close but with EBS you get System Centre Essentials and ISA (???) 2008 - the big difference is the installation time for 3 servers.

Can you deploy the messaging server from the EBS suite on it's own?

Cheers

Ivan

If you mean can you deploy yhe exchange 2007 server without the others the answer is no.
All three servers (in standard, 4 in premium) must be deployed and each server must be successfully installed before you move on to the next.
The exchange runs on two serves on the security server (gateway components) and the messaging server itself.

You can virtualise the messaging server on the management server and the security server according to some test setups.

I did the beta versions and it's a pig to install. If I was to be looking at a production setup I'd be running 3/4 1/2U boxes backing the storage for the exchange and other data off to a shared storage san. In testing for storage I used an iscsi setup for storage with raid 10 and 8TB storage, link aggregation and jumbo frames yada yada....proably be fc for production.
EBS is a great product but suits the 150+ miniumium.

Note; No Sharepoint 3 by default, No TS application server by default (use the 4th premium or another), no cluster support or scc for exchange.

Thanks for the clarification. Damn...