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Hi,

I have been asked to look at a small businesses network and implement some Server infrastructure moving forward but to be honest its in a bit of a mess currently and it needs stripping out and starting again, an exciting project at least and something I can learn and develop my own skills with.

Anyway, for some reason they have 3 Broadband connections through BT with BT Business Hubs all coming into the same site.

One server is onsite which isn’t resilient, its a glorified PC with USB storage attached for daily backups. Its running Windows Server 2008 r2 Foundation and is purely used to publish one App using RDS RemoteApp and its also a file server, albeit not heavily used currently.

The company is growing quickly, they have gone from a home office into a warehouse in the last 3 years and have expanded from 3 employees to around 50 in that time (25 core PC users currently all running home editions of Windows). I expect this number to grow once they have a better IT solution in place.

Email is hosted using Google Mail but with more and more employees this is getting expensive, they use and internet based application which is core to their business operation.

The company is UK based (14 PC users) with a site in Holland (6 PC users) and Ireland (3 PC users).

I know there is a requirement to add some robust server infrastructure as they intend to have a file / print server, domain controller(s), Exchange moving forward which I will do using Virtualisation across a 2-3 powerful servers allowing for expansion and will probably back up to a storage device such as a NAS. All machines will need to be rebuilt to use Windows Pro editions so I can add them to a domain as well.

Now I have set the scene I am really struggling to know what to do on the networking side of things as it isn’t an area I have much experience in.

They were talking about getting fibre broadband into the UK site as there current broadband connection is slow.

I did a speedtest on the server and ping was 45ms, upload speed was <1Mbps and Download speed was 10Mbps.

Would anybody have any advice where to start, what type of network I should go for, whether to use site to site VPN, Leased Lines or fibre broadband etc… Switch, Router, Firewall recommendations?

The networking stuff has really lost me.

Thanks in advance, feel free to probe for more information and I will give it if I can.

No idea on budget at the minute.

Chad

p.s. I may be going to work for this company in a Business / IT Capacity so keen to get it right.

@Rackspace_Technology @HP @Dell_Technologies @Cisco_Meraki_1

8 Spice ups
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Foundation is OEM only. How did they acquire it on that hardware?

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If Google Apps ($5/mo or $50/year) is getting expensive then the company is in rough shape. While not the cheapest, it is very cheap and includes a lot of extra features. That’s $4.17/mo/user. Think about how cheap that is!

Your alternatives for business mail are:

Microsoft Office 365 at $4/user/mo (a savings of only $.17 but you pay by month rather than by year.)

Rackspace Email at $1/user/mo with the SW discount. This is a big savings but if you want ActiveSync the price doubles.

So while there is savings to be had, they are tiny. In house email for such a small company is out of the question. If you think GMail is expensive, wait until you figure out the price of managing and maintaining in-house email in a business way!

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This doesn’t jive with your description of GMail getting expensive. The cheapest Exchange option is Office 365 which, as I showed above, saves you only seventeen cents per user per month. Moving to Exchange is fine, but you aren’t doing it to save money. The migration will cost more than the potential savings. In house, like I said, is for the rich and wealthy who wish to flaunt how much money they can throw away (add up the server licenses, CALs, management, mailbagging, etc. and the cost is easily 2x-20x the cost of Office 365.)

Likewise your server count doesn’t match your financial concerns or the size of the environment. Two servers, maybe at a stretch. Three physical servers? Why so many? Fifty users is tiny. Why do you need a second server? If “almost free” email is “too expensive”, what business need could their be for a second server?

NAS for backup is great. Just make sure that you don’t get tempted to back the virtualization hosts with it.

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That would be baseband. FIber can’t carry broadband. Narrow, wide and broadbanding are copper concepts.

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What kind of traffic is going over the network and what traffic will go between sites? You shouldn’t even consider in-house email so that traffic is all public. What files will be going between offices and on what protocols?

Start with the business needs and work back to the technology. VPN and Leased Lines are competing technologies. Fibre and Copper are competing technologies. If Europe is like the US, leased lines are, again, for the rich and extravagant and for those with special low latency needs between their offices. Rare for a fifty person business. VPN is almost certainly right for you.

If you are new to networking you might want to consider Meraki security appliances which handle VPN setup simply through a central web interface and makes the process really simple and they have WAN Accelerators built in for the VPN traffic to make communications between the offices a little bit better even when the lines are slow. That link will allow you to get a free trial of their gear to test it out. Meraki is a division of Cisco.

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My thought is that from the description you need a single server, a good one (HP, Dell, etc.) with a good service plan. Build it right with fast enterprise drives, a good RAID controller, OBR10, enough memory, etc. Get a good UPS, place it somewhere controlled. Treat it right… but only buy one. There is no need for a second server without a very clear business requirement that isn’t in your description (and would be highly unlikely for such a small company.)

Then get a good backup plan. Unitrends is a great option because it is all inclusive with software, hardware, support, etc. Or look at Veeam as software with backup hardware like a Drobo or ReadyNAS. Either way, backups should be the first thing that you design in, not the last.

Virtualize, of course. vSphere or HyperV. Server 2012 Standard will give you two instances to virtualize as a starting point. You have one as a DC and one as your file server / print server. That sounds like all you need for now. If you think that a second DC is really required (that seems unlikely with a good backup plan and such a small environment and nothing tied to it except for desktop logins which get cached anyway) then you will need a second copy of 2012 and you can run that on a desktop if needed as it will do basically nothing.

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The basic principle is… keep it simple. Don’t add complexity just for the sake of complexity. Complexity introduces risk and fragility and, normally, cost of acquisition along with cost of management. Complexity means that you spend all of your time keeping things running rather than keeping things running well.

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This is a great time, when you are about to have to acquire everything new, to evaluate your actual needs. Do you really need Exchange? Do you really need Active Directory? Do you really need Exchange? Or are these just terms that people know and say without thinking? Did anyone actually look to see if Windows even makes sense at all?

This is your chance, and you will never have it again like this, to actually look through the environment and see if…

  • Windows is actually the right choice for the desktop. Going to all Pro is going to cost an arm and a leg and you are running on cheap, commodity gear so you’ll not have the benefits that Pro brings when you buy it OEM on HP or Dell desktops.
  • MS Active Directory makes sense over Samba 4 (releasing this week) which is free.
  • Exchange is better than GMail? People are used to GMail already. What factors would make anyone want to move to Exchange? I like Exchange better personally, but I like Zimbra better than that. But what do the users want/need? In what way is Google Apps not meeting the need?
  • Leaving Google Apps means moving to another office platform. Are you just going to spend a fortune on MS Office, do without, pay for Google Apps still or move to LibreOffice?
  • Do you need a Windows fileserver or would a NAS do instead? Maybe a Windows-based NAS?
  • Do you really need print server for just 50 people? That need has decreased significantly as printer’s own print servers get more powerful and overall printing has decreased so much over the years.
2 Spice ups
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Arrrrrrr matey, welcome to Daveyjonesrouter.com!

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And I needed to post in this thread. I think SAM is answering himself.

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SAM, excellent responses. It was acquired with the Server, its a HP ProLiant ML115 G5, 250GB SATA drive and 4GB RAM I think, my description wasn’t fare.

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It’s not expensive at the moment for them but if the company grows I think we will have to look at something else as I think it will be cost effective, is there a general rule of thumb of when you should host your own Exchange server or equivalent e.g. 100 users etc…? I have looked at Zimbra, this may much better for their size currently. In the meantime GMail will continue to be used for sure as its just another layer of complication they really dont need.

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Excellent points on the number of Servers, I guess im trying to plan for future needs and not there immediate needs, the stupid thing is I dont know there future needs so yes I don’t require so many at all. I guess I should be growing IT with the business once the core needs are met.

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Thanks for the link, thats excellent. I need to make it as simple as possible and that seems like it will do just that and its fantastic they have WAN acceleration built in.

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Oh ok, so a “real” server but I know what you mean. Very low end kit.

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The rule of thumb is at 10K users, you can start to consider it. Yes, ten THOUSAND users. It’s NEVER more cost effective, it just becomes, at large enough sizes, so overwhelming to deal with the internal traffic going over the WAN that it doesn’t make sense in all cases.

You never “in house” to save money. Email is purely a commodity product today. Even running Zimbra, which is completely free, will cost you way too much to even consider. When you figure that you have to spend ~$2/user/month for proper mailbagging and filtering, there is no physical way to make in house email cost competitive.

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That violates the YAGNI principle of planning. Never buy today what you “might” need tomorrow. That’s a lot of risk with very little potential benefit.

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/10/you-arent-gonna-need-it/

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Excellent, thanks for the advice.

Can I ask a very stupid question with Hyper V and Server 2012 Standard, so it gives you two instances to virtualize as a starting point, can I create more than two VM’s say if I wanted a linux box for example?

A 2nd DC initially would be overkill and something I could introduce at a later date if ever required again growing with the company.

(Scott Alan Miller) 20

Yeah, Meraki gear is quite excellent. Very easy to use, looks good in the server room, easy to support yourself and easy to have a partner support, integrates with your wireless and switches too along with your system management / MDM solution. That’s why we partner with them, really great for SMBs needing that extra functionality but without dedicated in-house networking specialists.