I broke this off as a new discussion for you so that you can get your questions answered.
It is a good idea to page through the documentation before you begin. The documentation is located here:
http://www.symantec.com/connect/node/1525181
When you download SIM 7.1.x and install it on your Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit server, install the solutions individually, starting with just the Management Platform, and then adding solutions one at a time. If you're gutsy you can try installing the entire Client Management Suite, for example, but this hasn't worked well this early in the release.
The SIM installer will perform a readiness check which will ensure you meet the pre-requisites. IIS 7 needs to be installed with ASP.NET, ASP, and IIS 6 Management Compatibility installed. If any of this is missing, I believe SIM will alert you and offer to fix it for you.
.NET 3.5 SP1 is required. If it's missing, SIM will offer to install it for you. .NET 4 is not a problem, just realize you also need .NET 3.5 SP1 present.
Silverlight 3.0 or later is required. If it's missing, SIM will offer to install it for you.
SIM will also offer to install SQL 2008 R2 Express if it doesn't detect SQL. However, if you're hosting SQL off-box, skip this option. SQL 2005 or SQL 2008 are both supported.
To pass the readiness check you will need IE7 or IE8 installed.
Some other components -- Java 1.6, Flash 10, etc -- are "recommended" but not required. Java 1.6, for example, being necessary to access parts of the Software Management interface. It offers to explain how these can be installed, but does not offer to install them for you.
On the hardware side, it's going to look at CPU (multi-core 2.0GHz+ required), RAM (2GB+ or 4GB+, can't remember), OS (Windows Server 2008 R2), disk space (20GB+ free), and a host of other minor settings (certificate notes, crf.microsoft.com (?) access, WCF enabled). It also performs some additional IIS checks and will enable Classic .NET and a particular SSL setting if you haven't done so already.