I played with an early beta and it looked good. Definitely 64bit hardware required and no inplace upgrade supported. Very different to SBS2003, even more wizards than before and an all new console which looks similar to the Windows Home Server console - 3rd party apps can plug into the console too. Some other interesting changes too... for example SBS2008 doesn't support backing up to tape drives, so if you still want to do tape based back ups you'll need to purchase 3rd party software. Instead SBS2008 encourages the use of external hard drives. In my opinion this is a good thing, but others won't agree with me. Also, you can register a domain name during setup although I can't see many situations where you would want/need to do this. Also, no more ISA in the Premium version, so you'll need to have a separate, hardware firewall.
ISA is now called ForeFront Threat Management Gateway and is part of the new Essential Business Server 2008 Standard/Premium., which is intended as a step up from SBS
Simonm: How does 2008 handle external drives? Can it identify if you are using two? Can it store more than one backup onto the disk?
My understanding is that you can have a library of disks and treat them the same as how you would with tapes. So you could just do all backups to a single drive, or implement a rotation policy, and SBS backup would be able to handle that. But I haven't tried it myself, so I can't say for sure. I believe the backups are all image-based too which should enable quick recovery when needed.
Simonm: Missing the ISA is the biggest pain in the ****.
Yes, this will be a pain for current premium customers who rely on ISA for the firewall. But in saying that, having ISA integrated into SBS has caused problems in the past so moving the firewall onto a separate box does have it's benefits too. As RhysB said above, ISA is now called Threat Management Gateway and is part of the Forefront Security family of products.
Another big difference for SBS 2008 Premium is that it is now a two box install, with SQL 2008 running on it's own box. Standard is still a single server install.
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