SQL Server 2000 Consolidation: a business case

The HP Integrity Superdome and other HP Integrity servers have been successfully integrated into the
infrastructures of many leading companies. HP customers who are now in production with HP Integrity
servers and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 64-bit include ebm-papst, Raymond James, and Korea
Telecom. In addition to providing an understanding of consolidation and migration strategies, this
white paper relates the real-world experiences of these customers in case studies that detail the
specific advantages of the 64-bit HP Integrity servers with outstanding total cost of ownership (TCO).
Introduction to 64-bit processing
One of the key limitations of the 32-bit environment is its maximum virtual addressability—
approximately 4 GB. This is obviously not enough for many enterprise applications, such as SQL
Server, to scale in large and complex environments. To overcome this limitation, SQL Server uses
AWE (address windowing and extension) to address physical memory up to 64 GB. However, there
is some performance degradation using AWE. For more information on AWE and how SQL Server
manages memory up to 64 GB, refer to the following Microsoft articles:
• “How to configure memory for more than 2 GB in SQL Server”:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;274750
• “Large memory support is available in Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003”:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;283037
In comparison, a 64-bit Itanium 2–based system offers a substantially larger memory address space,
with a theoretical memory address space of 16 exabytes (16 billion gigabytes). As a result, and most
importantly, 64-bit processing eliminates the AWE layer and provides native memory addressability
to large-scale applications. Currently, 32-bit Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition can support up
to eight processors, while the Datacenter Edition supports up to 32 processors. In comparison, 64-bit
Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition can support up to 64 processors in a single partition.
Table 1 compares 32-bit and 64-bit processor capabilities:
Table 1. Memory limits of 32- and 64-bit platforms
General memory limits 32-bit 64-bit
Total virtual address space 4 GB 16 TB
Virtual address space per 32-bit process 2 GB (3 GB if system is booted with
“/3gb” switch)
2 GB (4 GB if compiled with
“/LARGEADDRESSAWARE”)
Virtual address space per 64-bit process Not applicable 8 TB
Paged pool 470 MB 128 GB
Non-paged pool 256 MB 128 GB
System cache 1 GB 1 TB
Physical memory and CPU limits 32-bit 64-bit
Windows XP Professional 4 GB/1–2 CPUs 32 GB/1–2 CPUs
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise
Edition
4 GB/1–2 CPUs 1 TB/1–8 CPUs
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise
Edition 1–4P
(only available from HP
and pre-installed on the server)
1 TB/1–4 CPUs
Windows Server 2003 Datacenter
Edition
64 GB/1–32 CPUs 1 TB/1–64 CPUs
In addition to Itanium 2–based platform support on Windows Server 2003 64-bit edition, Microsoft
released Windows Server 2003 x64, which will support both 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the
same system. The underlying architecture of the Windows x64 system is based on 64-bit extensions to
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