SBS 2008: Supported Networking Topology

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Justin Crosby and Wayne McIntyre]

Networking in SBS 2008 has been simplified down to one supported network topology. Today’s post will discuss this topology.

SBS 2008 is designed to be installed with a single network adapter. If SBS setup detects multiple NICs all but one will be disabled. The NIC must use a private IP address with a 255.255.255.0 subnet mask. The following IP ranges are supported:

  • 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255
  • 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255
  • 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255

SBS 2008 will not install with a public IP. If you must use a public IP you must change your IP after setup manually.

Below you will see an illustration of the supported network topology. As you see the SBS 2008 server has a single NIC. This NIC connects to the same switch(es) as the clients. This switch also connects to the firewall/router that gives your network Internet access.  In this illustration we also see a site to site VPN connection that is being established by the hardware routers, this can be used to connect a remote office to your SBS domain.

image

In this configuration your SBS 2008 server will act as your DHCP server for the main office. Both the clients and the server will use the router/firewall’s internal address as their default gateway. The clients and the server will use the server’s IP address as their DNS server.

SBS 2008 is designed to only have a single IP address on a single network adapter. If you must use multiple IP addresses on the SBS server please note that the SBS network wizards will no longer function as expected as they are designed to only support a single address. The SBS 2008 BPA will also report multiple IP addresses as a misconfiguration.