I'm having trouble finding some concrete information on what the minimum hardware requirements are for a production SharePoint 2013 environment. I'm talking number of servers in the farm.
I see the technet article but the details are skewed to me. It says
Web server or application server in a three-tier farm Pilot, user acceptance test, or production deployment of SharePoint Server 2013 or SharePoint Foundation 2013. 12 GB 64-bit, 4 cores 80 GB for system drive
Well, that's IF I have a 3 tiered environment. What if I have a 2 tiered environment?
Common sense would tell me that if I am running a heavy amount of services and a large user base, I should consider upgrading to a 3 tier. However, I have a customer who is arguing with me saying that performance is not "optimal" and that Microsoft technically supports a 2 tier environment so it should be fast. Is there somewhere where Microsoft definitively says "You must have 3 servers in a production environment"? Or how can I tell a customer that they need a 3rd server without so much push back on it?