THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA

Download details: Installing Virtual Server on Windows SBS:

Hot off the presses tonight is a white paper to install a virtual server 'under' SBS... but remember you can also put SBS "under" a virtual server.  Keep in mind that SBS max's out at 4 gig of max Ram.

We already had a poster ask for a clarification...

...and Les responded back....

Hi Phillip,

There are a number of things that affect performance when running virtual 
machines, especially in a production environment. But in any case, 1 GB ram 
for the SBS alone is really a practical minimum for a small environment of 5 
users; 2 or 3 GB of ram for the SBS will give you a large performance boost. 
Personally, I haven't seen large performance gains by exceeding 3 GB for the 
SBS server, even in larger environments.

Once we add VS and virtual machines, we need to consider resource 
allocation. VS is nice, as we can reserve resources for both the host and 
virtual machines.

I run several production SBS networks with VS and TS apps mode servers 
running as virtual machines. Acceptable performance is achieved with the 
following resources allocations:

a) dual processors, with 100% of one processor reserved for each of the SBS 
and the TS virtual machine.
b) 4 GB ram, either 3 GB for the SBS and 1 GB for the TS, or 2 GB each 
(depending on the number of TS users, and apps being run).
c) a seperate disk subsystem for the Virtual Machine.
d) a 5 minute delayed startup for the virtual machine on host system 
restart.

I haven't run into network bottlenecks yet, but as the number of TS users 
increases I expect I'll have to address this at some point.