Our company is looking at the possibility of a new ERP solution which would require a total redesign of our existing network infrastructure. (We are still running an old legacy AS/400 system with twinax cableing.
We have determined that SBS would be the most cost effecient solution for our domain controller, exchange, etc....
Here is the problem:
We are looking at moving forward in the next few months.
The sofware vendor is going to require us to use SQL standard on a seperate box.
This will require much more in licensing fees to do under SBS2003 than it would in SBS2008.
SBS2003 comes with SQL Workgroup edition on the same installation; 2008 premium comes with standard edition as well as a second server 2003 license and the premium CALs takes care of all the licensing.
If we move forward before the release of 2008, we'll have to get SBS2k3, an extra copy of server 2003, and SQL standard. We'll also have to purchase a SBS CAL and an SQL CAL for each workstation. We would go ahead and get software assurance so we can upgrade later, but we will have wasted quite a bit on unneccary licensing.
We would then have to upgrade from sbs2k3 standard to sbs2k3 premium and therefore we will end up with an extra copy of SQL Standard and server 2k3.
Any advice?
I'm thinking that if the difference between the "SBS CAL + SQL CAL" and the "SBS Premium CAL" will not be substantial we would be better off just upgrading from 2k3 standard to 2k8 premium and not touch our database server.
I dont know that there would be any noticable benifit to running SQL on server 2008 as opposed to 2003...
Do you see the sort of mess we could be in?
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