SIMS/CMIS on 2008 Server Standard

[Michael]

Hello all,

 

Over the summer I plan on upgrading numerous Curric servers to 2008 R2, however this would leave Admin servers on 2003 R2. Of course as most of us know, direct 32Bit to 64Bit upgrades are not possible, however Microsoft do support 2003 R2 (32Bit) to 2008 Standard (32Bit).

 

Has anyone done this or similar and do SIMS/CMIS run on 2008 Standard OK? SIMS is running on SQL 2008 and CMIS SQL 2005 at the moment. Many thanks.

[3s-gtech]

I've not done this exactly, though I've upgraded machines to 2008 from 2003 with a clean install. It should work fine though, and 2008 is a decent OS.

 

SIMS will run on 2008 32bit fine. However, you'll obviously be stuck with 32bit SQL, which may be an issue depending on your database size - if it's a small/medium primary you should be fine. Even as a medium secondary here SQL Server only uses 2GB of RAM for SIMS/FMS. Depending on the direction your licensing for SQL goes (do you use Express) it may pay to upgrade to 2008 R2 with the hassle of a clean install, just for future proofing.

 

If this server is heavily utilised, you may find the 4GB RAM limit for the OS a problem for performance, with swapping etc.

[Michael]

All the sites I support use full SQL 2005/2008, so it can use upto 4GB of memory as required (including the OS). The problem with Express (even at a small site) is it can only address 1GB of memory which would really slow things down.

 

I don't think Primary schools need to run SIMS/CMIS on 64Bit just yet, after all, it's been running on 32Bit for years. Of course starting again is better, but there's a cost associated with this. My thoughts were that a direct upgrade to 2008 32Bit would keep costs down and it 'should' work just fine.

 

The process is a lot more simple with Curric servers, but these are also DCs and 2008 R2 contains the latest technologies to manage Windows 7 clients. All my admin servers are just members, so upgrading them is more straight forward.

[3s-gtech]

Should work fine then, as you say. Stopping the databases entirely during the upgrade process, and making sure any other software on there is compatible, should be enough. My last experience of doing it directly was 2000-2003, and it was pretty straightforward. I later moved the same server to 2008, but I fancied doing it fresh as it was also going onto new discs.