What flavor of Windows Server 2008 is right for your company?
August, 2009

Windows Server 2008 comes in several major editions derived from the same code base. The most important differences among editions are virtualization rules, the number of processors supported, amount of physical memory exploited, and high-availability features. Windows Server Standard also limits two features, Terminal Services Gateway and Routing and Remote Access, to 250 concurrent connections.

Microsoft considers multicore and hyperthreaded processors to be a single processor, regardless of the number of cores and/or threads that they contain. All editions listed include rights to downgrade to lesser editions of Windows Server 2008 as well as equivalent or lesser editions of Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2000.