As part of a Sharepoint deployment project, this week I've been building up one of the blades in our blade centre (an HP C-Class with an MSA1500 sitting on the back). A couple of things have struck me as I've been going through the build process - firstly, the insanely huge recommended partition size for Windows Server 2008 R2. The minimum recommended is 64GB. Take a while and let that sink in. 64 GB. The blade I'm using comes equipped with a pair of 137GB SAS drives, so once we mirror them, nearly half of the available space is taken! Not funny Microsoft! I'm sure that the chaps at Redmond will justify this by saying that it means that the OS has the optimum amount of space to spread in to, but compare this with a CentOS installation on the same hardware. 1.5GB. There is no way anyone can justify more than 40 times space for an equivalent installation - our CentOS box runs mySQL, Apache with 4 virtual sites and 2 instances of our VLE (Moodle - more of that in later posts). It's just not on, and it's no wonder that a lot of the admins I speak to are looking more and more seriously at an Open Source back end...
Secondly, the lack of 64 bit driver support is a major pain. Building the blade with a SmartStart v7.9 disk was an absolute no-no, even though it's only around a year old. Had to download v8.3 to get driver support for R2 x64. It's no wonder that lacklustre support from vendors leads to the same from developers - on my 64 bit desktop, probably half of the apps are still installed in the x86 Program Files root. 64 bit computing is not a new idea, and until either Microsoft or Intel make a stand and push 64 bit then we'll be stuck in a situation where 64 bit chips are running 32 bit code, hosting virtual machines to run 16 bit code designed by 2 bit companies...