Ghost Solution Suite

It's 2018 now,  I am curious as to those that have installed MSSQL 2008r2 and wished they went to MSSQL2014.  What do you think ? 2008 or 2014?  We are going to install Ghost Solution Suite 3.2 on a virtual machine.  The amount of clients we will have is 20000 devices.  We have 50 buildings all connected via WAN connections.  Each building will have a server to deploy the images at.    Any thoughts, concerns, tips, helpful ideas would be appreciated.  

Before we tackle what SQL version, instance count, etc., just some introductory questions:

How are your current SQL instances licensed? Can you leverage existing SQL instances?

Is it fair to say that each GSS install will have an average of 400 clients?

Will PXE be involved in the imaging process?

What is the range of bandwidth, high and low, for each WAN site?

Will these 50 servers have a single admin or will the administration be spread out?

Correction:

We will not be doing 50 servers.  According to the Imaging Admin he stated that we will be doing 2 servers and we hope to have 4000-5000 active connections for imaging going on 1 server.  The images will be on 1 of the 50 servers in the building.  Our present Altiris 6.9 does 3000 active connections per each server, and we have 2 of those, with servers in the 50 buildings acting as file shares. 

PXE will be used.

The range of bandwidth will range from 50mbps to 200mbps.

SQL Instances I have flexibility and the same with licenses. 

Our present system on Altiris 6.9 in on 2 physical servers with 12CPU and 16GB ram. Building servers are windows 2008 r2 and sharing out to the clients on filesharing. 

The sql version is 2008r2 with 1 instance.  Networking in the buildings is 1Gb.

We would like to create 2 virtual servers(vmware) for GSS and the SQL server would be virtual too.  The OS would be W2K12R2.  SQL version is the question.  I dont really want to install sql2k8r2 and find out we should of done sql2k14. That would be either Enterprise or Std, not the express version. 

The short answer - SQL 2014 is fine. We use a mix of 2012 and 2014. If you want to put all express databases on the same instance, that maybe doable. We do it and have not noticed any negative reprocussions. In the end, keep the GSS and SQL servers close to each other to minimize latency.

Other things to consider

4000 to 5000 active connections per server is hitting the top of the 'theoretical' limit. Depending on forecasted load, reimaging rate, and amount of remote questions ... maybe 3500 is more feasible but your mileage will vary.

Maybe professional services should be engaged ,at a minimum, to be used as a sounding board.

thank you for your opinions.