What’s in the Premium Editions of Windows Essential Server Solutions?

I was having a discussion today about what’s actually in Premium Edition of both Small Business Server 2008 and Essential Business Server 2008.  So I started to whiteboard it up to explain it to a few of my colleagues.  After I finished we thought this would make a great blog post.  So you can make out my handwriting I’ll rewrite everything here as well.

SBS 2008 Premium Edition

You get everything you see in the Standard Edition plus…

A second license for Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition Technologies, both 32 and 64 bit versions are included (you get two disks but have to choose which one you want to use).  We do make some changes to these;

It must be a member server of an SBS 2008 domain and it must have have less than 75 users or devices in the network.  That’s all we do.  Now you may have noticed word ‘technologies’ when I explain Windows Server, our intention there is to make sure people know that is not the same as Windows Server 2008 Standard.  But apart from those two changes it is Windows Server 2008 Standard.

So the next question you’re going to ask is usually;

Q: Does it support Terminal Services Application Mode  

A: YES

Q: Does it include Hyper-V

A: YES

Next up I want to talk about SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition for Small Business.  In SBS 2008 we will ship both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of SQL 2008 (both live on the same disk). Again you get to choose one and are licensed for one instance.  We’ll also provide downgrade rights for SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition.  Same deal here when it comes to the for Small Business piece of the name of SQL Server, we just ensure that you don’t have more than 75 connections.

Lastly you might be wondering do we treat this server any differently?  In fact we don’t we treat it as any other member server in the domain.  Remember it’s possible to add other member servers to an SBS domain too.

EBS 2008 Premium Edition

When it comes to EBS it gets really simple.  Simply replace the numbers and the name with 300 and EBS you get the premium scenario.

The 75 user/device limit becomes 300.

We do some naming changes too, but only a small one - SQL Server 2008 loses its for Small Business moniker

Client Access Licensing

One thing worth noting here is if you are connecting to the SQL instance you should buy the Premium CAL.  You can read more about the CALs here for EBS and here for SBS.