Shutting down unnecessary SBS Services

As you said not going to use Sharepoint and the SBS Monitoring, you can disable the services.

Also refer this:
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/24117687/SBSMONITORING-CPU-constant-CPU-usage.html

Thanks for that - it looks like the script will sort out CPU usage - I want it to release all the memory back as well - can you confirm shutting down services will do this - are there anything's i need to do inside the console to get stuff shut down to stop any potential errors?

Shutting the SQL service will release the memory.

Best practice is not to shut-down any services unless you are absolutly sure what they do ans if they are needed or not.
The main reason for shutting down services it to improve security (in which case there are a number of tools - such as the security config vwizard which will help)

The amount of RAM you will save by stoppind SBS services is minimal - get some more RAM instead

SBS is a well compiled set of different products but all integrated with each other, if you are going to stop or worse deinstall parts you can and will get all kind of strange behaviour and errors. So best practice is not to just stop some features. Also SBS 2008 includes exchange 2007 which is designed to allocate a lot or even all available memory so if you free up memory on one site the other site will use it.

So if there are no significant problems then don't do anything if you are experiencing slowness on some parts, first troubleshoot if it is a memory issue or some thing else that is slowing your server, there are some known issues with SBS 2008.

How much memory do you have in your server and how many users do you have?

There's 8gb of memory. We're using it for file serving, print serving and for Exchange. Exchange is using barely any of the resources, SQL and Monitoring are putting a constant 30-40% load on the server - services that aren't needed. There are about 30-40 users connected. Adding RAM seems redundant given we can release resources by disabling unnecessary tools.... thoughts?

8Gb of ram for 30 - 40 users is too little, we deliver SBS 2008 servers with at least 12GB of RAM which is acceptable for customers with 10 - 15 users, for 30 - 40 you should be thinking about at least 16GB of ram or even better something between 20 - 24 GB.

So I would advice to add some additional memory, there are some possibilities to tune memory usage for the SQL databases, read here for sbs monitoring: http://www.thirdtier.net/2009/08/setting-the-maximum-memory-usage-on-sbsmonitoring/
and here for sharepoint: http://www.thirdtier.net/2009/08/setting-the-maximum-memory-usage-on-the-sharepoint-database/

OK - will up RAM, but still interested in shutting down anything that's not in use. Are you saying you've shut down these components and had negative effects? I'm not sure why I should run Monitoring while we're running 3rd party monitoring solutions on the servers.....

Yes, You will get all kind of errors in your logs, also when you stop monitoring the reporting feature from the sbs console will not work and generate errors. The database by sharepoint is also used by wsus. So if you stop part it will influence other parts and generate all kind of errors in your log.

I would recommend not to stop the services but use the articles in the previous comment to limit the mem usage for those databases so it will use minimal resources.

Pretty keen to shut down WSUS as well actually - we run Kaseya that's managing updates / monitoring / reporting.... so we just need Exchange and file serving....!

If you are not using SQL Server then you can disbale the services which decreases the dependency on the server.
Go to run--> type 'Services.msc' and select SQL Services in the services windows. Double click on the SQL Services. A small window will popup with the name SQL Server Properties, in the window select startup type as Disabled and apply those changes.

please check the dependency of the services when you are going to do this...

---Venkat

I still think running services on a server that doesn't need them but it seems redundant, i will bow to expert suggestions though.