New Branch Office Architecture - SBS 2003 Premium at Head Office

SBS >> New Branch Office Architecture - SBS 2003 Premium at Head Office Hi,

I have a client who is starting a second joint venture company with
some other folks and setting up a new office to run the business from;
about 30 miles away. This is the kind of next phase development of SBS
sites that Susan Bradley talks a lot about.

The company has a split-brain DNS with external domain and internal
domain abc.com, and a website. To promote the business and market it
as two offices covering a wide area they have registered abcnew.com,
which will be the new site address and email suffix. Finally for DR/BC
they want to use the two offices for each other's DR and thus kit and
phones etc will be needed at both locations if ever a disaster is
invoked. They have 10 folks at the head office and 5 folks at the new
branch office; with Software Assurance at both, thus a cold standby
server could be built at the branch office if head office goes down.

They are also considering, subject to cost, installing a fixed
Ethernet 2Mb link between the offices which could be used for both
VOIP and data traffic etc.

The head office runs SBS 2003 Premium SP1 with ISA 2004 and SQL 2000,
with one other server hosting printing, MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition and
WSUS; a 2Mb/256Kb ADSL router provides bandwidth for mail and web.

As the consultant I have been tasked to provide a suitable
architecture to deliver all of the above!

Naturally my first thought was wouldn't it be great to use SBS 2003
Premium at the other site, but we are only allowed one SBS box in a
domain and given that they want abcnew.com across all the business
units that was not a starter, thus a firewall, email replication,
maybe DC replication, VPNs and all that good stuff started to raise
its head (Outlook using RPC over HTTP was in my mind too), I also
wanted to leverage the head office RWW and OWA/OMA for all the users
from a home working and remote perspective.

Thus 2 scenarios:

1. Fixed 2Mb Ethernet link between offices for voice and data
(QoS needed), 2Mb/256Kb ADSL at head office for web and mail,
2Mb/256Kb ADSL at branch office for web and mail if the head office
has a disaster
2. No Fixed link and only 2Mb/256Kb ADSL available at each office
for web and mail

At head office I know that I can leave the internal domain as abc.com
and rerun the CEIW wizard to create new mail addresses for abcnew.com,
the website DNS being hosted by an ISP.

For 1. architecture being considered
Head Office
SBS Premium
Windows 2003 Standard
XP SP2 Clients, enough for all employees in case branch has a disaster

Branch Office
Windows 2003 Standard DC
XP SP2 Clients, enough for all employees in case head office has a
disaster
Cold standby server for restore of SBS

For 2. architecture being considered
Head Office
SBS Premium
Windows 2003 Standard
XP SP2 Clients, enough for all employees in case branch has a disaster
VPN Router to Router

Branch Office
Windows 2003 Standard DC
XP SP2 Clients, enough for all employees in case head office has a
disaster
Cold standby server for restore of SBS
VPN Router to Router

I am very concerned that in 2 the VPN connections, web browsing, email
and other real time internet applications will saturate the ADSL
connections and make the user experience very poor indeed, with a lot
of complaints.

I have been wrestling with what to do if they buy the link and what to
do if they don't buy the link, coupled with mutual office DR
capability my head is spinning, and thoughts or help greatly
appreciated!!

Thanks.

Information Technology115

SBS >> New Branch Office Architecture - SBS 2003 Premium at Head Office In article <EMail@HideDomain.com>,
EMail@HideDomain.com says...
> I am very concerned that in 2 the VPN connections, web browsing, email
> and other real time internet applications will saturate the ADSL
> connections and make the user experience very poor indeed, with a lot
> of complaints.

While you say 2MB, it's really 2mbps and has a limit of 256kbps - which
is going to kill performance for anothing other than fetching email and
web access.

If you share ANY files across the link you will grow to hate it. We
setup 3mbps/2mbps at the main office and then did 2mbps/1mbps at each
remote office (not using SBS at all) and found that remote users needed
local profiles in order to make login anything less than a pain, and
redirected my_documents (to the server) also proved to be a pain (lag).
We had a app that ran at the remote offices, used Crystal reports,
generated 300 pages of preview - it would time-out at the remote
offices, but it would run in 2 seconds locally.

We ended up with Terminal Server at the main office, a nice Dual Xeon
box, 4GB RAM, 50 licenses, and a RAID-1 for the OS + RAID-5 for users
data. This changed the users experience completely, life was good, they
actually hugged me after the T/S was installed!

One other thing - DSL is problematic in my experience, we've dropped it
in favor of "Business Class" cable modem service or a REAL T1 for proper
connections and VPN service.

We also use real firewall appliances, not cheap NAT solutions, so there
is a WatchGuard X1000 at the main office (you could use an X700) and
then their smaller units at each office.

Consider Terminal Server, put a backup array in the remote office and
then backup a second copy nightly to it so that you have an off-site
backup over the VPN Tunnel.

--

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