How much should the staging environment equal the live one?

Question

Management has decided to go for Windows 2008 64 bit with IIS7 to service our main website.

They want to have it staged on a Windows 2003 server with IIS6.　[Edit] Yes 32 bit is what they are planning for staging [End Edit]

I want to know what issues, beyond the security issues, that I should put forward, suggesting we should opt for the same server in staging as in the live environment.

I have read great posts like this, but I want something I can say with a few bullet points

That staging and live environments should be the same, is easy for any seasoned developer to understand, my problem is that I am trying to explain this to upper level management people who seem to have already made up their mind...

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[Edit] @Luke:

Its basically a website which gets updated quite often, the whole site is to be staged, tested, before deploying to the live environment.

The site is to be left at the hands of the Marketing department, (non developers) and have them verify that the site has no issues before deployment.

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[Edit++] Code is ASP.NET, used in 3 important customer ordering pages.

Thanks,

Ric

Answer 1

I hope thats not a 32-bit Windows 2003 staging server you're using to test functionality for a 64-bit Windows 2008 production server or you are in for a world of pain.

The staging server should be, as far as possible, the equivalent of the production server because what you are using it for is to answer the question "Does this software work on the production environment?" before actually committing to loading it on the production environment.

Answering the question "Does this software work on a server that is almost totally unlike our production server?" is not useful and in reality all you are doing is committing to testing and debugging the software in yet another environment, but in an environment that you won't actually use. Its more work and in the end you still don't know if it works on your production environment, which is the entire point of having a staging server in the first place.