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Can you help me to decide which version of windows to use? Any actual performance comparisons?

I am going to setup number of servers (2-10) to host asp.net mvc application in Amazon EC2 with Load balancing and I am thinking on using micro instances because of relatively high processor power. Database is be hosted on separate more powerful instance type (High-cpu medium instance), so only software on those servers would be IIS, Workstation services (to connect to network drive) and ASP.NET.

Can you please help me decide which windows to choose - 2008 or 2008 R2 for such "blade" machines?

On one hand i want to go with 2008 R2 because it should have better performance with asp.net mvc application. On other hand, R2 can be only 64 bit and Micro instance has only(!) 613 MB of memory.

I am serving only pages, ajax queries and few javascript files - all other content such as images, css etc goes to cloudfront, so number of requests per second would be relatively low (<20 per second per server)

1 Answer 1

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Both operating systems have a minimum requirement of 512MB, so either one on a micro instance is really pushing it.

That being said, if you have to run it in a micro instance and you're choosing between the two, I would choose 2008R2, simply because it is newer and either one will likely perform horribly once you add AV.

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    Server Core may be not-quite-so-horrible for performance.
    – Hyppy
    Jun 1, 2011 at 14:49
  • Thanks for your answer. I will have also one node which will run on small instance, which has 1.7GB of ram but cost 4 times more (and has about the same processor power) so I will be able to compare.
    – st78
    Jun 1, 2011 at 14:52
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    I concur, go with Server 2008 R2. Server 2008 is based on the Vista kernel (afaik), and we run into way more bugs on Win2k8 than on R2.
    – Lucky Luke
    Jun 1, 2011 at 15:30
  • Thank you all! I installed Server Core R2 and it works very good for me. Performance is about the same as small instance
    – st78
    Jun 2, 2011 at 0:00

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