2003 Standard or Enterprise??

[scottew]

We are currently trying to decide if we need to go with the Standard or Enterprise edition of 2003 Server on some new servers we are purchasing.

My main question is whether or not it is possible to allocate CPU and memory to specific applications such as SQL with the Standard Edition.

The server I am concerned about will be a Dell PowerEdge 2850 (4gb Ram, 6x300gb RAID 5) with Dual Intel Dual Core 2.8ghz 2x2 Processors. This server will be running SQL and Sharepoint Services and eventually we will be installing Sharepoint Portal Server.

Our other server will be an Exchange Server which is a PowerEdge 2850 (2gb Ram, 4x73gb RAID 5) with a Single Intel Xeon 2.8ghz processor. I think the Standard Edition should be fine for this server since Exchange is the only thing that will be running on it.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[penauroth]

I will give it a shot...

First off refer to the hardware section of the Microsoft comparison web site (

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsser...parefeatures.mspx#64Hardware Specifications).

Windows 2003 Standard should do with this particular setup. A limitation with using Standard is you cannot upgrade the RAM unless you go with Enterprise. Standard is capped at 4GB. If you think any one process is going to consume 2GB of memory space (oracle hits this ceiling a 1.7GB) then you will surely want to upgrade to Enterprise (which can use up to 4GB of memory space for any one process). I would check resource benchmarks given the amount of users you plan to support.

As far as your main question, you cannot allocate memory space to any process via commandline or gui however, you can control processor affinity and priority for any running process. I don't think you can preconfigure affinity or priority for any process in a stopped state.

Hope this helps.

Paul

Work on Windows, play on Linux.