Of course, you’re hanging around the TechNet and MSDN web sites as I do, so this may not come as a surprise, but the hardware and software requirements for SharePoint Server 2010 are now out.
The surprise, or rather not, is the massive amount of hardware required to run SharePoint Server 2010 in a production environment. You may recall that the minimum amount of RAM required to run MOSS, according to Microsoft, was 1 GB. After a couple of years, everyone knew that the comfortable limit for a production server was 4 GB of RAM, even though you might make do with less for smaller installations.
Listen to this: The minimum requirement for SharePoint Server 2010 is 8 GB of RAM. I’m not joking. That’s the minimum, according to Microsoft.
If you extrapolate those numbers, and remember that a comfortable amount of RAM for a server with MOSS is four times the minimum, that means SharePoint Server 2010 will require 32 gigabytes of RAM for a comfortable setup.
Go ahead and scale that up. You may want to run four front-end servers and an application server for a medium size farm setup. That means you need 160 GB of RAM. I don’t even have that large a hard drive on my laptop.
Oh, and you can make do with 80 GB of hard disk. And, for some perverted reason, you need a DVD drive.
The big question, however, is: Is it worth it?
To answer that, let me quote the infamous movie Carry on Again Doctor: Oh, yes, I know it is.
Of course, you may wonder if Microsoft has purchased a RAM manufacturer lately, or if they’re really that desperate to get people into the cloud. Anyway, to help prepare, I’ve set a new start page in my browser: http://bit.ly/2RtNgA
Here is the official TechNet documentation.
.b
PS: I hope to come back to this page in ten years and think: 160 GB of ram? So what, I got that in my toilet paper holder. However, at this time of writing, 24 GB of ram, in a 3x8 GB kit, costs $2,306.86 at Amazon.
1 comments:
Good post - although I had looked over the 2010 hardware requirements previously your post really highlighted the huge difference between the MOSS / 2010 hardware requirements.
I think it's worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of customers were on x86 hardware when MOSS was released, and I'm sure a significant amount still are today. As i'm sure you know already, customers using x86 hardware are limited to 4GB of (often fragmented) address space. However, the recommendation for some time now has been to upgrade to 64 bit for performance reasons.
The SharePoint team have stressed that the reasons for requiring 64-bit hardware for SP2010 are almost all based around performance and scalability and I'm sure the 8GB recommendation is there for similar reasons.
I think it will be interesting to see the rates of adoption for SharePoint 2010 in light of these requirements, particularly for small businesses that have purchased 64-bit hardware over the past few years but installed a 32-bit OS for software compatibilty reasons (e.g. custom code, drivers etc).
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