Just a heads up... After installing R8 for Notification Server all seemed to go well, but after one day the console threw an error every time we opened it stating it couldn't connect to the database, and when you ran nssetup it failed.
Turns out the coresettings.config file gets corrupted after install (sometimes...most times) so you need to run a repair on the NS and the service pack.
If you have a good copy of your coresettings.config you can also just replace the corrupted one but I recommend pausing the NS or at least stopping the services before you do this.