Compliance of Oracle 10g R2 with Windows XP SP2

Question

Hello everybody
I am representing my company for making a decision of deploying appropriate versions for Oracle and Windows.
The vendor suggested Oracle 9 on Windows Server 2003, whereas we opted for deploying Oracle 10g R2 with Windows XP SP2.
According to the vendor
XP is not a true 'server' product and therefore does not provide many server functions and may have restrictions on numbers of users that can connect.
If the vendor's notion is correct, would anyone explain the limitations/restrictions of our solution.

Answer 1

One of the first problems that you will encounter, inbound connections limit in Windows XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314882
Memory allocations are handled differently between Windows 2003 and XP (paged pool, non-paged pool, file system caching, etc.):
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx
In some cases the memory allocation differences can cause XP to display errors indicating "unable to allocate memory from the paged pool" or the non-paged pool, when Windows 2003 would otherwise continue functioning without problem. Windows 2003 offers a registry change to work around this problem:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312362
Microsoft will stop making Windows XP available for resale in June 2008, except on extremely light-weight computers, and update support will end before update support ends for Windows 2003.
There are typically differences in the hardware that ships with a computer loaded with Windows XP and one that ships with Windows 2003. You will have a hard time finding a computer with Windows XP that ships with redundant power supplies, dual backplanes, SCSI RAID 10 support, dual network interfaces, built-in system/diagnostics, etc.
While Windows 2003 is the server equivalent of Windows XP, there are many features in Windows 2003 that are not available in Windows XP. XP is designed to be rebooted frequently (shut down every night, or reboot once a week or once a month) and is geared toward foreground application performance. Windows Server 2003 is designed to be rebooted infrequently (apply security updates, recover from rare system fatal bugs) and is geared toward providing good background application performance (the Oracle database instance would be a background application).
If you are unfamilar with Windows Server 2003, take a look at the books "Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Administrator's Companion" by Microsoft Press and "Mastering Windows Server 2003" by Sybex. Compare what you find in those books with what you might find in Microsoft's Windows XP Resource Kit book.
Charles Hooper
IT Manager/Oracle DBA
K&M Machine-Fabricating, Inc.