Microsoft indeed has made the whole installation thing much easier than before!

Starting with the 6.5GB ISO download, it took about 2 hours to complete, then create a new VM with W2K8R2 as the OS type which SBS2011 is actually based on.

Shortly I found out the ISO won’t allow me to continue as I have less than 120GB of free space? Does it really require that much? OF COURSE NOT! (later found out it only took 22GB after the clean installation). In order to continue, I gave the VM 160GB with thin provisioned disk and 2 vCPU with 4GB Ram. The installation did take 2 hours to complete considering the ESX host is a pretty powerful and modern one, most of the time went to the part “Expanding and Installing Files”, although that process said only 30 mins.

After reboot, simply follow the installation wizard such as setting up the domain name, IP address (Must use a Private IP, note this, I think MS wants people to use SBS2011 in an Intranet behind the firewall/gateway only!), administrator username and password, then login via RDP. To my surprise, I found the default Administrator account got disabled! (why is this? Due to security reasons?) I have to manually enable it from the Active Directory User Console in order to use this account to copy files to the disk.

Wola…a new SBS2011 server is ready with all the latest version of IIS/SQL/Exchange and more…for only USD545, you got the Essentials Edition with 25 users and NO limit on CALs and if you need 75 users, then it’s only a bit more, USD1096, we can now say SBS has finally reached to a state that most of the SMBs can really afford and make the good use of it!