Hi all, Being a newbie to the complex world of business networking, I'll apologise in advance if this is a stupid question. I'm after some advice or direction to some resources on the issue of adding a server to a network. My business network has one server, 8 clients and 2 printers running Windows Small Business Server / Win XP. The server is tasked with all network duties - domain controller, mail, file and print server. The network seems to struggle especially when using MYOB and we have been advised upgrade to the enterprise edition of MYOB running terminal services. This in turn poses the question of whether I need to upgrade the network. My thoughts are to add a server to manage mail, file and printing and use the existing server as the domain controller and application server for MYOB - I have no idea if this is a good idea. Being an IT enthusiast I would like to manage the process myself as much as is sensible and call in the expert when necessary. I would appreciate any advice. Cheers

It's always a good idea to relieve the DC of as much load as possible. You might want to consider moving MYOB to a different server if it's a big (resource intense) application.

I agree with Curt. It would be good to relieve the primary server of as much as possible. It would also relieve the amount of data flowing through your server network card(s), which would make accessing it a bit faster. WHen I had to upgrad my network, I upscaled to Gigabit cards and Switch. ALso added more RAM and additional Processors to the server motherboards. THis dramatically increased the network performance. Best of luck! "i woke up this morning and all of my stuff was stolen and replaced with exact duplicates."

Before you go throwing money at this, why not figure out WHAT EXACTLY is causing the slow down? Is it a lack of RAM? Slow Disk? A particular program that's using a lot of CPU time? A slow CPU? Perhaps a slow network? SBS is designed to manage a business of up 75 users on one server... and it was designed with hardware from FIVE YEARS AGO in mind. So today's equipment should be more than capable to handle 8 clients. I would suggest you learn more about Performance monitor and try to determine WHAT is causing your problems. Then decide what the best course of action is. I do not know MYOB, but even for 8 users, I don't expect it's a huge resource hog (maybe I'm wrong, but you can determine this with a performance monitor analysis). By the way, strictly speaking, YES, you want EVERY SINGLE SERVICE on it's own server. You want a Print Server, a file Server, a mail server, a Domain Controller, a DNS server, a DHCP server, etc... but in a small business it isn't practical or economical to do this. And the impact on overall business productivity should not be significant in an 8 person company if the server needs to reboot.