I've very happy to see that Steve Smith and Penny Coventry have published about a whitepaper on moving a 32bit windows 2003 server/32bit SharePoint 2007 farm to 64bit Windows Server 2008 RC1/64bit SharePoint 2007 farm.

This helped take a lot of mystery out of the process for me, thanks guys!

You can find it here http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads 2007.htm

Direct Link http://www.combined-knowledge.com/Downloads/How to move MOSS2007 from W2003_32bit to W2008_64bit.pdf

Labels: 64bit

Did you notice in the last post on Joel's blog, he mentions MOSS 2007 is the last 32bit version of SharePoint? It will be 64bit only the next version. So what's the advantage of 64bit for SharePoint? It means you can have more than 4GB of addressable memory (RAM) on your Web front-end servers, or in fact any server in your farm. And SQL server 2005 is faster at indexing content on 64bit. More on MOSS 2007 and 64bit here.

Another important point is that if you are setting up MOSS 2007 now, and you choose 64bit, you might find your upgrade path to the next version will be less complex, I don't know any details yet, but for example, an in-place upgrade would not be an option if you were on 32bit. So, learn your way around 64bit now, you'll be glad you did!

Labels: 64bit