Windows SBS, EBS 2008 to Ship in November

Microsoft announced on Monday that it would ship its next generation small business server product, Windows SBS 2008, and its new mid-sized business server, Windows Essential Business Server (EBS) 2008 on November 12. The announcement came as part of the company's annual partner conference, which is being held this week in Houston.

Windows SBS 2008, codenamed Cougar, and Windows EBS 2008, codenamed Centro, are part of Microsoft's new Windows Essential Server Solutions product line, which also includes Windows Home Server. As with previous versions of SBS, both SBS 2008 and EBS 2008 feature integrated installers for multiple server products and centralized management consoles.

For the first time, the Premium version of SBS 2008 is designed to be installed on two separate servers, and the products comes with separate Windows Server 2008 licenses to enable that type of install. EBS 2008 is designed to be installed on at least three different servers. Both products are 64-bit only (though the second server in SBS 2008 Premium can optionally be 32-bit).

Currently, release candidate (RC) versions of both SBS 2008 and EBS 2008 are available from the Microsoft Web site. The company says that newer RC builds will ship later this week.

For more information about SBS 2008 and EBS 2008, please see my three-part preview on the SuperSite for Windows.
http://www.itprotoday.com/article/showcase/windows-sbs-and-ebs-2008-preview-part-1-pricing-and-licensing.aspx