Any advantage moving from Server 2003 to 2008?

[Brewhaus]

We are looking to rebuild our server to improve speed. Currently we are running a Server 2003 Small Business edition (32-bit) on an AMD Athlon 64 (dual core) 2.00GHz machine with 3GB of memory and SQL Server 2000. We already own Server 2008 but have been using it for a different purpose, but as our needs have changed we will have it available to use elsewhere. My thoughts are to throw a new machine together with an Intel i7 processor and around 8GB of RAM. That would bump us to a quad core processor and much more speed.

The reason that we are considering this move is that we are increasingly seeing a speed issue with our AC websites. I am not sure the reason, but can only assume that it is the increased activity on the sites that are pushing the server too hard, and that is resulting in things slowing down. Obviously slow is a bad thing where our sites are concerned.

My thoughts are to put a new machine together with an Intel i7 processor and around 8GB of RAM. We will probably even go with an SSD drive, at least for the drive with the web files and DBs (we will use a separate drive for the Windows installation). We are comfortable with W2K3 as we have been running it for years, but will we see improvements by going with W2K8 64-bit? And, would it be a worthwhile investment to also upgrade to SQL 2005 at the same time?

And, if it is worth moving to the new machine and Win2K8 are there any bumps that we should expect in the transition?

[butterscotch]

Not sure about the technical stuff but at least for us we ended up paying less for the newer server...Having a 2003 server was more expensive.
Cheers,

Serge

[jdarby]

did you run into any issues with site functionality going from 2003->2008+? did you also migrate from SQL 2005 to a newer version?

[Brewhaus]

We had no issues with our site when we migrated, but it sure sped things up. Because we also migrated from SQL 2000 to SQL 2008 we had to export the db from our old server and then import it into SQL 2008, and could not just copy the db files across (if memory serves). All in all it was a pretty smooth migration.

[mikek]

The main difference between 2003 and 2008 is IIS. IIS 7.0 (WinServer 2008) or IIS7.5 (WinServer 2008R2) have different architecture are much faster and optimized for asp.net
comparing to old IIS6 that comes with 2003.

Upgrade from 2003 to 2008R2 (better than 2008) is strongly recommended for sites running AbleCommerce 7.x or Gold. For legacy sites still running AC 5.5 it is better to keep the
current 2003 environment since there is no difference in asp.net 1.1 module and upgrade (migration) may require more work.

[jdarby]

Both of the sites we're running have a decent amount of customization done to them by certified ASP programmers. Did you run into any problems with customized installs or were yours 100% untouched versions of AbleCommerce?

[Brewhaus]

We have several customizations, none of which needed to be updated when we upgraded the server.