We are a few months away from releasing our new product and are currently speccing up the environment.
This was our thought process
A collapsed environment (database and web server on same machine) would give the best performance. However, this would mean that the database server would be in the DMZ – not optimal for security. Therefore, the choice was made to have the web server and database server on two different machines
The web server will be used as a remoting endpoint and nothing else. I have not used Windows 2003 web edition before, but there is nothing that would indicate that it is unsuitable for our requirements
The database server will run on Windows 2003 Standard edition for the time being. This limits us to 4GB which should be adequate, as SQL Server standard edition only supports 2GB of memory. It would be good to have spent more time investigating 64 bit versions of Windows and SQL – as you can get Xeon based systems for a reasonable price. This would get around the AWE “hack” that exists with 32 bit SQL server. Note that there are two versions of Windows 2003 Server 64 bit – x64 (currently under development – shipping first half 2005) and Itanium.
I will be looking to get Sp1 on these machines as soon as possible - see previous post on Software configuration wizard
As mentioned, we are going with Sql 2000 Standard Edition - using SQL Server Enterprise edition would be nice, but at $19,999 per processor license (we are hosting an external internet application with lots of users, so this per processor licensing model makes most sense), this is not really feasible. However, with SQL 2005 Standard edition now supporting unlimited memory, and at $5,999 per processor, this would appear to be the way to go in a few months from now. I got this information from Eric Nelson’s post – a really useful blog, and the inaugural member of my blogroll.