Windows Server 2012 vs Windows Server 2008 on 1gb of ram

Question

I will be purchasing a vps soon and I there are two possible operating system that I can use, Windows Server 2012 Standard and Windows Server 2008. The vps will only have 1gb of ram. Memory wise what would be the better operating system.

Thanks,

Solution

Even though this may not be a very good question. The clear answer without a doubt is Windows 2012.

Windows 2008 has no advantages over 2012 in terms of low-memory scenarios.

Windows 2012 on the other hand, was designed more than ever, especially with virtualization scenarios in mind where limited memory or hypervisor-enabled dynamic memory is available.

PS: Both operating systems will run with 750MB of RAM.

Comments

[Michael Hampton]

In my lab I squeezed a fully functional AD DC plus DNS into 512MB of RAM using Server Core 2012. I don't think that would have been possible on 2008 R2...

[Ryan Ries]

@MichaelHampton Indeed. If you enable Hyper-V dynamic mem. with a lower limit of 512MB, a Server 2012 server will page everything out until it consumes only 512MB of RAM... however, I've found in my own tests that you gain a lot of performance if you set the min. to 750MB just so that not as much data gets paged out to disk. Just setting the min. from 500MB to 750MB or 1GB gives noticeable gains in responsiveness in my experience.

[Michael Hampton]

Yeah, it was functional at 512MB, with one user and one computer joined, but I wouldn't run it that way with any significant number of objects.

[Ryan Ries]

@MichaelHampton I think that may have something to do with why an "extra small" VM deployment in Windows Azure is given 750MB of RAM.

[user1598202]

Server 2012 refines previous versions of Server. It also comes with some great new features like IIS8 & more. So, I would suggest you to go with Windows Server 2012.

[Tom O'Connor]

Go with Server 2012, as Server 2008R2 is EOL for support soon.

[Greenstone Walker]

As an aside, I saw a presentation at a conference about a usable (barely :-) Windows Server 2008 core install file & print server with 160 MB of RAM.