SBS 2008 upgrade for 5 user network

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Hi guys,

Not sure whether it is too early to post this, but I need to try and
sort something out. We are a small shop with around 5 users and 8
Exchange mailboxes. We only really use SBS for the Exchange
functionality, but we all tend to use Outlook Anywhere or ActiveSync.
We do put data on the server which is backed up nightly to external
NAS with hotswap drives. Even though there are 5 physical users, we
tend to only be accessing the machine for one or two users at a time -
i.e, not everyone.

The machine we got 4 years ago for this is:

Pentium 4 3.00 HT CPU
2GB RAM
80 GB SATA drives mirrored using 3Ware RAID card.
Cheap Nvidia graphics controller.

This doesn't owe us anything, and can easily be converted to a desktop
machine for one of us.

We also have an antispam gateway appliance running on a Via Epia
system which I wish to get rid of, using Vmware ESXI on the server in
order to provide the same functionality. The system currently uses
less than 1GB of RAM and less than 500MB of disks space.

I was going to go for a single quad core machine, 4/8GB RAM, and 2
500GB SAS drives in RAID-1. I am not concerned whether Dell or HP,
just depending on who has the better deal. I need it to be supported
on ESXI, though if this brings up the cost of the server too much, I
will stick with the EPIA machine running that function.

I read somewhere that the memory was more important than the disks in
an SBS 2k8 environment, but with so few users will this make a
difference?

Andrew.
.

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