You know that little rule about “not installing beta software on your production server”? Well, I just went and did that with System Center Essentials on my SBS box and this is how I lived to regret it! I couldn’t get it to install properly and so I decided to remove it and that’s where things started to go wrong. It didn’t trash my server or lose me any data but caused me enough headaches that I decided to reinstall from media again. Sharepoint stopped working and I couldn’t get it back again, the backup wizard stopped working and other errors started to appear in the logs. In the end I reinstalled from the SBS 2003 R2 media and putting data back, having to get a new SSL certificate and get the mobile devices synced back took a whole day and evening, not to mention locking myself out of Vista when unjoining the domain - eventually reinstalling with Vista Enterprise from the MSDN subscription! Sometimes we have to learn the hard way and that’s why I will not be doing that again. Test it in a Virtual environment!
Posted
by vijay on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007
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March 22nd, 2007 at 4:15 pm
That is bizarre I have Essentials RC1 running on my SBS network and it works just fine.
March 22nd, 2007 at 6:45 pm
That’s interesting as I tried it pre-RC1 so maybe some of the issues with installation have been sorted. It wasn’t the installation that caused the problem, it was when I tried to remove it.
March 23rd, 2007 at 4:16 am
Been there, got the T-shirt! I think this is a lesson we all have to learn the hard way. A while back I really trashed my SBS server and I resolved “never again!”. Now I have a second server running Virtual Server 2005. I taught myself to use the OEM Preinstallation Kit and Sysprep and I keep a set of base images for desktop and server OSes. Whenever I need a new test platform, I simply create a differencing virtual hard drive with it’s parent disk pointing to one of my Sysprepped base images and I’m up and running within a few minutes.
The only trouble is, virtualization has been so succesful for me that my virtual server is now running several products (SQL2005; CRM; SharePoint 2007 hosting my company web site) full time and it’s getting harder and harder to find resources for temporary installations. Before much longer I am going to need a third server - and all this just to support my own personal “habbit”.