Windows Server 2008 R2: 64-bit Only

Microsoft has announced that Windows Server 2008 R2, the server companion operating system to Windows 7, will run only on 64-bit processors. According to the web page describing improvements to Scalability and Reliability, "With customers being unable to purchase a 32-bit server CPU for over two years, the performance and reliability advantages to moving to this architecture were too beneficial to ignore."

That's pretty cool. We've known for a long time that the most recent version of Exchange, Exchange 2007, would run only on 64-bit servers, and Microsoft announced at PDC 2008 (and on this blog) that SQL Server 2008 R2 (due to be released in the first half of 2010) will be 64-bit only.

Looks like the 32-bit server is dead.

So...will the Standard Edition of SQL Server still be limited to 4GB of RAM? That would be pretty lame, but it's probably true.