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The Joel on Software Discussion Group (CLOSED)

I'm looking at building a new server - it will run Win Server 2003 and SQL 2005 (standard). Until yesterday I was going to use a Xeon, but then I looked at the Woodcrest.

I can afford the woodcrest - and there is no extra cost for x64 versions of Windows/SQL server.

Apart from behind the scenes the O/S will be running 64 bit, are there any differences/issues I should prepare for? The server's role is a web-server, no other apps are planned to be installed/migrated on to this server.

Slightly nervous of the leap to 64 bit.

Thanks
Danny

Well, I have very limited experience -- only my machine at home and a server at work that I usually only remotely connect to -- but I have a couple of observations:

 o Good luck finding drivers.  All the drivers you NEED are going to exist and work just fine -- motherboard, sound and video, for instance.  However, anything on the outside of that is going to be tough.  No pinter drivers for my color laserjet, no drivers for my scanner, none for my webcam.  The Nostrom SpeedPad works as a gamepad, but the other software is broken.  Obviously, for a server this is probably okay for you.
 o When things crash, they're a lot nicer about it.  You seem to get more protection for the OS with 64bit.  This can be a good thing or a bad thing.  The good thing is that the OS is pretty rock-solid -- I've never seen the OS crash.  The bad thing is that bad code is not allowed to get away with much.  It will detect shenanigans pretty quickly and kill them.  If you HAVE to run bad code, it might not work well on 64bit.
 o You get two versions of Internet Explorer.  One works everywhere but is 32bit.  The other is 64bit, but no plugins work for it.
 o Oh yeah, the NTVDM is gone, so you can't run any Win16 apps.  I REALLY hope this isn't an issue for you. :)

On the IIS front, you have the option of running it basically in 32-bit or 64-bit mode. With a large number of uses, you will need to downgrade to 32-bit.

Within SQL Server 64-bit (you can also run the 32-bit version if you wanted), there are a number of relatively minor bits of missing functionality. For instance there is no 64-bit JET database driver, as Microsoft has deprecated that line, so you can't have JET linked "servers", and if you use JET from DTS you have to launch it as an operating system command, explicitly running the 32-bit version.

We've had great luck with the 64-bit editions, although we intentionally spec'd out Dell servers that we knew would be fully supported.

You should be concerned, because of the driver issues.  If you're purchasing this hardware through a vendor, I would ask them questions.  Generally speaking, 64bit is overrated, especially when it comes to performance issues, the only clear cut advantage is the formal support of more than 4GB ram.

A database server is probably the only situation where there are some minor performance improvements for 64bit computing.

I encourage you to make the jump, just do it on side hardware, get it all setup and be sure you have full driver support, but BE AWARE that if you need to support some random hardware, driver support might be weak or non existent.

I'm still waiting for the 64bit market to mature a bit more before I make the jump, even though I'm building a Core 2 Duo (64bit) setup in a couple months, I'll be sticking with 32bit Vista for now.  Things will be even better 6 months after Longhorn Server comes out.