I have a client with a large ASP app that apparently is fairly memory intensive. I’m helping them migrate to new hardware they have running Win2k8 R2. They have 4 physical servers with 32gb of RAM each. I’m making the assumption that ASP apps run as a x32 process. So I see that we have two options:

On the application pool enable web gardens. Use the physical servers as VM hosts and split the box into say 4 web servers each. Any thoughts on which path will provide us better performance? I’m just not really sure how ASP will handle a machine with lots of memory, and I’m worried it won’t really be able to address the memory well. (you can ignore all the obvious stuff like increased maintenance of 16 web servers vs 4, or the flexibility virtualization gets us over physical servers, etc)