EBS 2008 Click Through Demo

If you read this you’ll probably be interested in EBS 2008. However, not everyone has 3 spare servers or a big machine with Hyper-V or VMware lying around to test it on. To make sure even you can get a hands-on experience with the new product, Microsoft created a click through demo. You can find it here. They did the same thing for SBS2008 btw, so you can prepare for the beta exam (see below).

If you want to run EBS2008 on a Hyper-V (or VMware of course) machine you’ll need at least 8GB of RAM, and something like 100GB of disk space. Especially the Management server (the first to install) requires a lot of space for the WSUS downloads. Unfortunately, you cannot set it to leave the updates at Microsoft so it will download up to 30GB of updates, depending on your products and language settings and approvals.
Also, you have to create 2 seperate networks in you virtual enviroment, because the Security Server (server #2) requires 2 NIC’s on different subnets. When using Hyper-V, be sure to use the Legacy Network Interfaces. I had my networks connect with RRAS on the host to my wireless home network. Not the best solution (I have to reconfigure RRAS after every reboot) but it works.

EBS2008 Technet website
SBS2008 Technet Website