Installing and upgrading help

I noticed that XAMPP has many of the software packages included to make maintaining Moodle easier including:

Apache 2.2.3, MySQL 5.0.24a, PHP 5.1.6 & 4.4.4 & PEAR + SQLite 2.8.17/3.2.8 + multibyte (mbstring) support, Perl 5.8.7, ProFTPD 1.3.0, phpMyAdmin 2.8.2.4, OpenSSL 0.9.8d, GD 2.0.1, Freetype2 2.1.7, libjpeg 6b, libpng 1.2.12, gdbm 1.8.0, zlib 1.2.3, expat 1.2, Sablotron 1.0, libxml 2.4.26, Ming 0.3, Webalizer 2.01, pdf class 009e, ncurses 5.8, mod_perl 2.0.2, FreeTDS 0.63, gettext 0.11.5, IMAP C-Client 2004e, OpenLDAP (client) 2.3.11, mcrypt 2.5.7, mhash 0.8.18, eAccelerator 0.9.4, cURL 7.13.1, libxslt 1.1.8, phpSQLiteAdmin 0.2, libapreq 2.07, FPDF 1.53, XAMPP Control Panel 0.6

This list includes the "FreeDTS" for connecting to a MS SQL server, PHP MY ADMIN, and eAccelerator.

Is it discouraged to use XAMPP in a production environment?

I was looking for an easy way to install the FreeDTS package and noticed that this could be an easy way to install it along with the PHP eAccelerator.

Thanks,

Eric