Since Microsoft announced several years ago that they would be discontinuing Small Business Server we have been trying to wring as much life out of it as we could. Small Business Server was a platform that allowed our customers to manage most of their computing needs on premise. Many customers in the medical and financial sectors are still leery of the “cloud”. Not trusting medical and financial information to a mysterious place for safekeeping.

In responding to those need we had to put together a cost effective way to keep most of the services provided by SBS on premise. We looked toward VMWare to provide the platform to deliver multiple servers with the same functionality as Small Business Server. The first piece of the puzzle came with Windows Server Essentials that provides a dashboard that handles many of the tasks the Small Business Server Console incorporated. But the real bonus was the ability to have that dashboard integrate with a separate on-premise Exchange server that allowed for the easy creation and administration of user accounts and mailboxes. We round the VMWare host off with a Symantec Brightmail Anti-Spam server and we were in business.

Now we can deliver on one physical machine all the services they valued on Small Business Server.