My team is developping a number of windows services in .net. These services communicate through a messaging solution and some of them have an expected response time that is well below 100ms.
The ops team responsible for provisionning servers doesn't want to install Windows Server 2003/2008 on these machines for financial reasons. Instead, they provided us with Windows XP. They also claim that because these servers are running on a virtualized environment (Vmware ESX), we don't need to add another "server" OS on top of it.
Somehow that seems wrong to me but I'm not an expert in that sort of things.
Therefore, what are the advantages/disavantages of running Windows Server 2008 vs Windows XP for that kind of applications?
Edit :
- I'm interested in comparing the X64 versions of Windows XP and Server 2003/2008, as some of our services are consumming more than 2Gb of memory.
- The windows services I'm talking about are supposed to be up 24/7, but we can provide them with windows for server updates (if that's relevant to the discussion).
- By That kind of applications, I'm refering to the first sentence of my question => windows services in .net doing some computations based on incomming messages. Some computations are very short (less than 1ms, with a throughput of a few thousand messages seconds) and we expect a reasonable latency as described, and other quite long (a few minutes, but they are triggered a lot less). Basically, you can see that as some sort of agents communicating over a bus, whatever the agents are.
