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My application/website is currently running on windows 2003 32 bit server, in my last business meetings our business people has asked to move my application/website on window 2008 64 bit server, but before this they asked me to prepare a document presentation for below queries:

1) What are the benefits for using 64 bit server on 32 bit server?
2) Why we should use the 64 bit server? 
3) What can be the drawbacks of 64 bit server?
4) My application/website is using some 3rd Party tools, do they will work fine?
5) And the main thing is that, our website is built in .NET 2.0 C# and they are looking for some CODE tweaks after the deploying application on window server 2008 64 bit, there main objective is that after using the 64 bit environment what type of CODE tweaks can be done in my application on code level, so that its performance gets better than current.
6) Does all the above implementation will work on VMWARE (Virtual Machine)

I need to prepare a good and complete word document, please guide me to prepare this.


Best Regards, Manu

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jun 29 '11 at 16:39

This question came from our site for professional and enthusiast programmers.

closed as not a real question by jscott, Zypher Jun 29 '11 at 16:43


Offtopic, and you should do this research yourself. It's one thing to ask a minor point, but you want someone to write up an entire migration plan without any details. –  Marc B Jun 29 '11 at 16:37
Do NOT alert modifiers about comments that hurt your tender feelings, especially when they're correct - your approach to this 'question' WAS lazy. This site is for IT professionals, not for those with no research capabilities or the thin-skinned. Carry on like this and you'll be suspended or banned. –  Chopper3 Jun 29 '11 at 18:07
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1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote accepted
  1. 64-bit has a few advantages. The main one being that the system can easily work with more than 4 GB of total memory; processes are not limited to 2 GB or 3 GB, and additional general purpose registers. This can mean serious performance benefits for some applications that use it well.
  2. Seems to be addressed in #1.
  3. Software compatibility was a big one; especially drivers. If you have old hardware, make sure there are proper drivers for it. New hardware shouldn't have this problem since it's been around so long. Also check and make sure any software you use is 64-bit compatible. And in some cases; 64-bit hurts performance. That all depends on the application. For example: ASP.NET 2.0 (without service packs) had terrible performance because the 64-bit JIT wasn't making as many optimizations as the 32-bit version. Eventually that was fixed in updates and later versions of the framework; but it's the type of thing you can run into.
  4. You'd better ask them.
  5. Not a whole lot. The 64-bit CLR does a lot of the heavy lifting when making JIT optimizations. Just make sure your application is compiled to Any CPU.
  6. Well, the purpose of a VM is to virtualize an environment. If it didn't work; it'd be a pretty lousy virtual machine software. (tl;dr: Yes)
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@Manu Do you want him to come over and wash your dishes for you too? –  Izzy Jun 29 '11 at 16:55
@Manu I'd discuss this with whomever the document is being turned into. –  vcsjones Jun 29 '11 at 16:58
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