The real reason consultants use Microsoft SBS over Linux

David M Williams
Saturday, 13 September 2008 09:03

Opinion and Analysis

A Windows network with an SBS server can have more than one domain controller. Of course, the other domain controllers need to be regular Windows Server systems at the regular, non-SBS, price. There is something which concerns me more however.

A Windows Active Directory network infrastructure assigns what it calls flexible single master operation (FSMO) roles to the servers in the network. In a domain there are four FSMO roles available (and five in a forest.) Each FSMO can be assigned to one and only one server.

By default, the first server set up in Active Directory holds all the FSMO roles – which means your SBS server. Good and sensible practice suggests you would break this up to distribute the FSMO’s across multiple servers. Yet SBS will not allow this. One further SBS constraint is that it must hold all FSMO roles.

To me this is an unacceptable risk and it cannot be underestimated. If you use SBS, no matter how many additional servers and domain controllers you deploy your Active Directory root and FSMO roles are all held on the one single machine. If it fails your network goes down. The fix is not pretty; a dead SBS server requires what’s known as “graveyard swing migration” and it’s not a trite operation.

What other criticisms did I receive? Oh yes, some people failed to understand how I could not love SBS so they assumed I’d never used it. In truth much of my frustration comes from having to integrate “yet another fricking SBS site” to nation-wide infrastructures during mergers and acquisitions.

Another conceded I was right that SBS did not permit trust relationships and even conceded SBS greedily hoarded all the FSMO roles to itself. They gloated that I probably didn’t know about that though, but wrong again.

One more person figured if I recommended Linux to someone it’s only because I’d want to run it on clunking old Pentium III machines. This was an interesting one. Firstly, it’s wrong; after all, I said if you didn’t spend money on SBS you could spend more on the hardware. I’m advocating even better machines than the SBS consultant!

But secondly, this argument implicitly recognises that Windows Server products impose a heavier hardware burden than Linux. If my critic took their argument to its logical conclusion they’d recognise Linux will perform better than SBS on equivalent hardware.

Let’s cut to the chase. Why do consultants recommend SBS?

CONTINUED