Windows 2008 Editions - Overview & Features

Windows 2008 comes with different editions based on the requirements and features and each edition with it own roles. We will try to list out the basic requirements and features of each edition which helps the people to decide and decide on which edition required for the business.


Windows 2008 Standard Edition

This edition is looks like 2003 Standard edtion used for small to medium sized business. We can choose this edition most often to support windows 2008 roles in many business environment. Standard edition will take care of the roles of domain controller, file and print server, DNS server, DHCP server and application server. These roles are the vital roles to the organisation's network infrastructure and they do not required advanced features like failover clustering, Active Directory Federation Services.

* It supports the maximum of 4 GB of RAM. ( 32 GB of RAM for 64 bit version)
* It supports 4 processors in SMP configuration.
* It supports Network Load Balancing Clusters but does not support failover clustering.

Windows 2008 Enterprise Edition

This version is the advanced feature of windows 2003 enterprise edition. You can deploy this version when you need to use SQL server 2008 Enterprise Edition and Exchange Server 2007. This version contains extra processing power and RAM that manages the high end to products to run on this server.
The below technologies are the feature of Windows 2008 enterprise edition and these are not available in Standard edition.

Failover Clustering It allows another server to take care of the service client requests when original servers fails.
Active Directory Federation Service This features allows idendify federation, often used by many organisations with their partners who require access to its local resources.

* It supports 64 GB of RAM ( 2 TB of RAM for 64 bit version)
* It supports 8 processors in SMP Configuration

Windows 2008 Datacenter Edition
Widnows 2008 Web Edition