I've
no comment to offer on the suitability of flavour of Windows 2003 for IMail, but
I can comment on how the Hyperthreading is treated.
On all
Windows 2003 servers with hyperthreading enabled, you will see double the number
of physical CPUs in the Task Manager, in the Device Manager, and in
WinMSD. This lets applications see 4 CPUs on a dual server. However
for thread scheduling and for licencing the OS, the HAL (Hardware Abstraction
Layer) knows which ones are the physical CPUs and which are the virtual
CPUs.
Windows 2000 servers do not have that distinction, and Microsoft will not
back-port the logic from W2K3 to W2K. W2K sees hyperthreading virtual CPUs
as physical CPUs, so you would get into licencing issues if the number of CPUs
exceeds your licence.
You
would also get into performance issues because Microsoft simply uses the first
CPUs it sees and ignores the ones that exceed your licence; as the order of
discovery is physical, virtual, physical, virtual... you end up using half
physical and half virtual CPUs, when what you want are only the CPUs that
are physical to fit in your licence constraint. Therefore, if you have a
licencing problem with W2K, either upgrade to W2K3 or turn off
hyperthreading.
Andrew
8)
After watching things run for a couple of weeks on
Windows 2003 Server, I have concluded that my IMail/Declude setup is running
+30% more efficiently than it did on Windows 2000. Because of this, I am
thinking of getting rid of my Windows 2000 installations and replacing them
with Windows 2003.
I haven't noted much discussion around here
regarding Windows 2003 Web Edition as a suitable host for
IMail/Declude. From what I have read, I don't believe there are any
limitations that would prevent this setup from running properly, though I'm
not yet positive at this point. Here is a link to the matrix that
Microsoft has published:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/features/compareeditions.mspx
The
only thing that stands out is the limitations to 2-Way SMP whereas Standard
Edition supports 4-Way SMP. I'm not sure if dual hyperthreaded
processors are the equivalent of 2- or 4-Way SMP. Maybe someone could
offer up some knowledge there. Even if so, the hyperthreading can be
disabled, and I'm not convinced that having 4 processors/instances is
beneficial to the environment.
I also know that MS SQL server can't be
run on Web Edition, but that isn't an issue here. All of the other
things that it says it won't support are things that I would have disabled
anyway.
So does anyone here have any experience with Web Edition and
the limitations, and have an opinion about whether or not this would work with
an IMail/Declude setup (or for that matter another E-mail platform since IMail
will soon enough be 86'd).
Thanks,
Matt
--
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MailPure custom filters for Declude JunkMail Pro.
http://www.mailpure.com/software/
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