We are in the final stages of developing, testing and deploying our new Windows Server 2008  platform with IIS7. We have found the Microsoft deployment system to be somewhat rigid, but we have successfuly implemented a complete auto deployment platform that will install a custom configured version of Server 2008 in half the normal time. We are aiming for a 10 minute install, but that appears to be unlikely, but we may get close.

We are curious to see if our customers continue to order SQL Server 2008 in conjunction with their 2008 Server as commonly as we have seen in the past.

The VPS and Dedicated Hosting platforms are the current platforms of choice for Windows deployment. However, as many of you can relate, we have decided that anything less than 1 GB of RAM is, for all practical purposes, unusable for 2008 Server or SQL Server 2005.