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Do we go with Windows Server 2008 Standard or Enterprise? We're not doing clustering. 32GB of memory with 2 processors, local disks.

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Look at the documentation and work it out for your environment. We simply cannot do that. – Ben Pilbrow Sep 28 '11 at 0:15
Shouldn't this be the answer for every question on this site? Sometimes there are things that I wouldn't find from reading the docs that more experience people would know right away. – Sam Sep 29 '11 at 16:10

closed as too localized by Ben Pilbrow, WesleyDavid, voretaq7♦ Oct 23 '12 at 20:04

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4 Answers

up vote 0 down vote accepted

I really don't believe that you will NEVER upgrade your memory, so I would suggest you stay away from the Standard Edition and/or the x86 architecture. 

Version                              Limit on X86   Limit on X64    
Windows Server 2008 Enterprise       64 GB          1 TB
Windows Server 2008 Standard         4 GB           32 GB

Also why not go directly to Windows Server 2008 R2 (which is x64 only) and stay with an older release?

Version                              Limit on X64   
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise    2 TB
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard      32 GB

I believe that the from the above tables, the Enterprise x64 edition ("plain" or R2) is the way to go, so you don't have to worry about reinstalling a new operating system if someday you need to upgrade your memory.

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up vote 1 down vote

Oddly enough, the answer to this question takes a bit more searching than I think it should do. Anyway, from what I've been able to gather it appears Standard is all you need for the OS.

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This is true for most, but if you have 256Gb of RAM, standard won't cut it and you'll need to upgrade to enterprise. This happened to Stack Overflow back in the early days! – Mark Henderson♦ Sep 28 '11 at 1:40
up vote 1 down vote

You don't specify what architecture (32 or 64 bit) you're going with, but Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition 32 bit only supports 4GB of RAM. If you want to run with all 32GB of RAM and you want to use Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition then you'll need to go with the 64 bit architecture.

Notice I didn't say anything about Windows Server 2008 R2 or SQL Server 2008 R2, because you didn't specify it in your question. This answer is strictly related to W2K8 and SQL2K8.

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up vote 0 down vote

Agreed with joeqwerty :

on 32bits architecture : you will need windows enterprise to support > 4Gb of Ram otherwise use windows server installed in 64 bits

what I mean is you don't specifically need Windows enterprise if you are going to install SQL Server 2008 enterprise (if I understand your question)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143506.aspx

rgds

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