Did you know: Most companies grow faster than they think they do, and, when they have to scale up, one of two things happens: Either they add more standard servers, or they rip apart standard servers to install higher-end servers. The first causes sprawl, and the second causes disruption and manpower overruns.
Scalability is a central concern to IT organizations seeking to meet spikes in demand for essential applications or planning future growth. Windows Server 2008 provides numerous avenues for scaling, including support for tremendous memory and processor loads.
As organizations rapidly grow and change, IT infrastructures must remain flexible and scalable to help support, manage, and secure expanded functionality, an influx of additional users and locations, and increasingly robust applications. Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter, and Windows Server 2008 R2 for Itanium-Based Systems easily scale to adapt to the increased needs for data warehousing, transaction processing, e-mail capacity, and similar business-critical workloads.
Scale-up features exclusive to the high-end editions of Windows Server 2008 R2 include:
Supports up to 256 logical processor cores for a single operating system instance.
Supports up to 2 terabytes of RAM
Operating system support for Hot-Add Memory and Hot Add/Replace Processors for Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter and Windows Server 2008 R2 for Itanium-Based Systems, and Hot-Add Memory for Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise.
Unlimited virtual private network (VPN) connections.
Unlimited Network Policy connections.
Unlimited Terminal Services connections.
Failover clusters scale up to 16 nodes (8 nodes with Itanium).
Windows Server Hyper-V-based virtualization (see Windows Server 2008 Virtualization with Hyper-V).
Hyper-V virtual machines are able to address up to 64 logical processors in the host processor pool.
Server Core (see Compare Core Installation Options).
