I wanted to shed some light on the subject of SBS 2008 for new installers of the OS. In first installing SBS 08, I looked over the “Getting Started Guide” that comes with the retail boxed DVD set. It says that you “should” store all of your data on a separate partition or disk, while keeping your system partition on another volume. However, when SBS is installed, it automatically places everything on the system partition!
Fortunately, there is a very easy way to change the storage locations for all of the shares, exchange databases, and sharepoint databases, if you know where to look.
By opening the “Windows SBS Console” on the desktop of the server, you can go to the “Backup and Storage” tab, then by clicking on the “Server Storage” sub-tab.
On the right, they give you links to move the data to a different partition or disk, whichever you prefer.
As stated by the installation guide, SBS 08 needs a minimum of 60GB for it’s system partition, but I’m starting to wonder if that requirement was made if the data is on the same partition as the system.
I kept the system partition as 60GB, because I’m sure it won’t let you install with anything less, and since I have a RAID 10 system with 4 120GB drives, that still gives me a total of about 340GB. Subtract the 60 for the system partition, and I still have a hefty 240GB left over for user files, emails, etc.
I just wanted to share that little bit of information before people go trying to manually change the 3 shares that SBS comes with (RedirectedFolders, UserShares, Public), as I’m sure by manually re-creating some of them will surely give you errors in the long run!
Remember, it will be easier to move the locations of these folders when you first build the server, as they will be empty. If you decide to move them after there is data already there, it will take some time to move them, and your clients won’t be able to connect to them until the process is complete!
On a side note, I’m enjoying the fact that DFS was implemented by default on these shares, as it will help future migrations, due to the fact that server names won’t be published, only DFS ones. That should help out a lot!
I hope this tip helps someone out there before they go messing with manually re-creating the shares, as I almost did!
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