SharePoint 2010 is a hefty upgrade from SharePoint 2007 and the hardware and software requirements have also jumped. This is the first in a series of posts looking at the planning guidelines published by Microsoft. All references are at the end of the post.

Microsoft has published the following on TechNet, as the minimum required for running SharePoint servers for small to medium-sized deployments. For large deployments (>20,000 users), Microsoft recommends using the Storage and SQL Server capacity planning configuration guide.

Hardware Requirements

Web Servers, Application servers and single server installations

  • Processor – 64-bit, four cores
  • RAM – 4Gb for development/evaluation; 8Gb for production
  • Hard disk – 80Gb system drive

Database servers

  • Processor – 64-bit, four cores for small deployments; 64-bit, eight cores for medium deployments
  • RAM – 8Gb for small deployments, 16Gb for medium deployments*
  • Hard disk – 80Gb system drive

* Microsoft also makes the following recommendation for database servers. Intended for large deployments but I know clients with less than 5,000 users planning 2 or more Terabytes of content storage on SharePoint 2010. If you’ve got lots of content, increase the RAM on your database servers:

  • Up to 2 Terabytes of data = 32Gb RAM recommended
  • 2 to 5 Terabytes of data = 64Gb RAM recommended
  • (More than 5 Terabytes  = split across separate hardware and/or consider using Remote Blob Storage)

In both cases above, the 80Gb system drive is raising eyebrows. 20Gb to 40Gb is the normal recommendation for the partition running Windows Server 2008, up from 10Gb for Windows Server 2003.  80Gb is quite a jump. Microsoft also makes the following recommendation:

  • Maintain twice as much free space as you have RAM for production environments

It is important that your system drive does have plenty of free space, but a flat 80Gb makes no sense given the RAM recommendation. Installing Windows, SQL Server and SharePoint usually takes up about 15Gb of the system drive, provided you are careful to ensure all data and log files are placed on separate data drives. However, Microsoft has added in a note which is new for this version of SharePoint:

If you contact Microsoft technical support about a production system that does not meet the minimum hardware specifications described in this document, support will be limited until the system is upgraded to the minimum requirements.

In other words, try and make sure your deployment meets those guidelines and curse Microsoft for their laziness issuing such a generic guideline. At a minimum, make sure you have enough disk space free for twice the amount of RAM. Tick that box and it’s hard to understand how Microsoft could blame the size of the system drive for technical errors. If performance is the problem, it’s time to scale up or out which is not a reason to call Microsoft’s technical support.

The RAM recommendation for web front-ends is steep compared to older versions of SharePoint and other web applications. I’d rather see a deployment with two web front-ends load-balanced each containing 4Gb RAM than a single web front-end containing 8Gb RAM. Hopefully in this day and age you will run them as virtual machines which should give you the flexibility to scale-up later if RAM is a premium during the initial deployment. If you are short on RAM, do NOT put the query component onto the web front-ends (this is suggested by Microsoft in their topology diagrams for small farm deployments). The query component includes a copy of the index and searching can be a RAM-intensive process. Also, if you have enough disk space to hold a copy of the index on the web front-ends, you should have enough disk space for that 80Gb system drive!

The RAM recommendation for the database server is short for small to medium deployments, given the recommendations based on database size when in the Terabytes. If you have from 1,000 to 20,000 users who create/download lots of documents, follow the large farm guidelines and give those database servers more RAM.

Finally, if you are planning a single-server installation whether it’s for a small office or for development/evaluation, it is unlikely that 4Gb RAM will be sufficient to run all services. My demo machine (virtualised) currently has 6Gb RAM allocated. Every additional 1Gb RAM above 4Gb = a big jump in performance.

Software Requirements

SharePoint 2010 is only available in 64-bit edition. That means it will need to be running on 64-bit hardware (or virtualised machines) running 64-bit Windows Server and 64-bit SQL Server. Here’s the full breakdown provided by Microsoft:

One of the following operating systems: (Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter or Web Server version)

  • 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 R2
  • 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 with Service Pack 2

One of the following versions of SQL Server (if you don’t use the built-in database for single-server installations)

  • 64-bit edition of SQL Server 2008 R2
  • 64-bit edition of SQL Server 2008 with Service Pack 1 and Cumulative Update 2 (later updates are not recommended)
  • 64-bit edition of SQL Server 2005 with Service Pack 3 and Cumulative Update 3

For Windows, there’s an update that must be installed prior to installing SharePoint. Links to the update are in the Hardware and Software Requirements (listed in References below).

Before installing SharePoint, the server has to be running IIS with the Application Server role (applies to all SharePoint servers, i.e. Web front-ends and Database Servers as well as the Application Servers), Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 with Service Pack 1, and Powershell 2.0 plus some other bits and bobs, full list is in the Hardware and Software Requirements.

Finally, not strictly to do with the servers but I’m not planning a post for client software. Clients accessing SharePoint should be using one of the supported (i.e. has been tested) browsers

Full functionality:

  • Internet Explorer 7 32-bit
  • Internet Explorer 8 32-bit

Limited functionality: (some can be resolved using add-ons, see link under References below for details)

  • Internet Explorer 7 64-bit
  • Internet Explorer 8 64-bit
  • Mozilla Firefox 3.6 (on Windows, Mac OSX and UNIX/Linux)
  • Safari 4.0.4 (on Mac OSX 10.6)

Other browsers and versions may work but will likely experience reduced functionality. Note: Internet Explorer 6 is NOT supported.

TechNet References:

Finally, if you really want to scare your budget sponsor, check out the server specifications used by Microsoft for testing: :-|

Hope this post has been useful! For more information and resources as well as ongoing updates, please visit the Architecture and Planning section of my SharePoint 2010 Handbook.