The purpose of this white paper is to share architecture, design, and deployment considerations and experiences based on the Microsoft.com x64-based Web server solution.

In March 2004, approximately one year in advance of the official release of Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 x64 Edition, Microsoft.com decided to evaluate the benefits of implementing servers built on the x64-based hardware platform by running prerelease versions of that operating system on production www.microsoft.com Web servers. By April 2005, 100 percent of the production Web servers for Microsoft.com were running on the x64-based hardware and operating system platforms.

The virtual memory address space limitation that is inherent with the 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows® had increasingly led to challenges in application stability and troubleshooting for the Microsoft.com operations team. With 64-bit versions of Windows, the virtual memory address space for an application is greatly increased. That crucial feature combined with the ability to easily execute 32-bit applications with high performance has resolved what had become the number one issue for the Microsoft.com site—memory contention. The x64-based hardware platform can natively execute 32-bit code at roughly the same performance levels as similarly configured 32-bit hardware, and yet the 32-bit environment within the x64 version of Windows also enables 32-bit applications to run without any code modification, making the platform migration virtually seamless.

The resulting platform upgrade to the x64 version of Windows has drastically increased the mean time between application and Web service recycling for Microsoft.com Web servers, thereby increasing the overall site availability. More impressively, the CPU load on the servers decreased by 50 percent, and page response times for some applications are up to fifteen times faster.

The purpose of this white paper is to share architecture, design, and deployment considerations and experiences based on the Microsoft.com x64-based Web server solution to demonstrate the value of current Microsoft products concerning highly available, high-performance Web sites. This paper briefly discusses the evolution of the Web platform at Microsoft.com, the challenges that the operations team encountered with the 32-bit platform that the x64-based platform resolved, the migration and deployment strategy, and the resulting infrastructure architecture.

This paper assumes that readers are technical decision makers and are already familiar with Windows Server 2003 Web server technologies, such as Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6.0, Microsoft ASP.NET, and the Microsoft .NET Framework, and with associated technologies, such as Network Load Balancing (NLB) and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000. An organization can employ many of the principles and techniques that this paper describes to plan a Web platform upgrade. Likewise, an organization can apply the design considerations for an x64-based Web server infrastructure to most any enterprise-scale IT environment. However, this paper is based on the Microsoft.com operations team's experience and recommendations as an early adopter. It is not intended to serve as a procedural guide. Each enterprise environment has unique circumstances; therefore, each organization should adapt the plans and lessons learned that this paper describes to meet its specific needs.