Well, in my continuing research I came up with something from
Microsoft's site that claims that you can only use this to serve "Web"
stuff. Obviously a licensing restriction and not an issue with
capabilities.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/overview/web.mspx
I haven't seen the EULA for this, so I can't be really clear on what is
going on, and we all know that MS's licensing is a mess that they can't
even figure out.
Web Edition is also only sold as OEM, and from my research on OEM, it
says that the license is bound to the "server" and not transferable.
The issue of course is what constitutes the "server". I don't believe
that they choose to enforce that based on my experiences with
re-validating with their folks in India.
I kind of have this principle that if you aren't going to license
something properly, why bother in the first place. So if I'm going to
install Windows 2003, I think I am going to stick to Standard Edition
and get a non-OEM license for that. I've been able to pick up a copy
on eBay for $500, and should be able to find more at that price. The
boxed stuff is in fact transferable, and I stay away from the NFR and
promotional copies since those too are not valid for a production
environment.
I don't want to give the impression that I am perfectly licensed
everywhere because I'm not, I just like to pay to be properly licensed
when I can justify it for my business and not pay for something that
still wouldn't be perfectly kosher. I would also much rather pay
Declude or other small companies more money rather than Microsoft
however...if I was rich though, I wouldn't complain at all. At least
we have eBay.
Matt
Colbeck, Andrew wrote:
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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--
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MailPure custom filters for Declude JunkMail Pro.
http://www.mailpure.com/software/
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