Building My MOSS Farm: Part 1

Few months ago, I bought a serious Intel Core 2 Quad (4 cores, that is) with 2.83Ghz and 8GB of ram. It's a 64 bit machine with 120GB of 10,000 rpm for the C drive (makes all the difference, believe me) and additional 500GB drive. The plan? Not a nuclear bomb, but to build out a 4-server MOSS farm.

In these series, I'll chronicle the build and configuration process.

1) I will be using my MSDN subscription for the software.
2) I decided on installing Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition R2 (64 bit, of course).
3) I am going with SQL Server 2008 Enterprise edition.
4) MOSS 2007 SP1 + February update.
5) I will be using VMWare to host my farm. So why not Virtual PC 2007?

Reason 1: Although it's free, I was so disappointed that 64-bit guest machines are not supported. Are you kidding me?!
Reason 2: VMWare just rocks. You'll see why soon.

Approach

1) Build a base machine with all updates and patches + .NET framework 3.5 SP1.
2) Clone this machine for the 4 servers in the farm.

MOSS Farm

Server 1: App server, i.e central administration + indexing role
Server 2: Database server
Server 3: Web server 1 + query role
Server 4: Web server 2 + query role

To be continued...