Production SharePoint 2013 environment with only one server?

Question

I'm currently running a small SharePoint 2010 farm with two servers. The first is a dedicated Microsoft SQL server, and the second is my SharePoint server running my web application and Central Administration. The two servers are at minimum system requirements for the software and perform well, able to handle all of the traffic they receive easily.

In moving to SharePoint 2013, I'd like to have a single server running:

• Windows Server 2012R2
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012
• SharePoint 2013

What limitations will I have? Technet says I can run all that on 24GB of RAM with 4 64-bit cores, but specifically says the setup is for "Development or evaluation installation of SharePoint Server 2013 running all available services."

Is there anything preventing me from using a single server in a production environment? I'll need support for InfoPath, Excel Web Services, User Profile Synchronization, and Search.

Answer 1

Basically its depend upon your requirement. as per your questions...you want to use the support for InfoPath, Excel Web Services, User Profile Synchronization, and Search. One thing is missing how many users will access the farm and how many documents search will crawl.

As MSFT streamlined technology guideline, it is clearly mentioned one server farm will recommend for evaluation / development or if you have very less number of user / documents. This type of Infrastructure only recommended for <100 users.

Streamlined Topologies for SharePoint 2013

Another thing, Search & User profile need a lot of resources on the server, you have the SQL server on the same box then fault tolerance will not be an options.

For Production, i would go at least two servers, dedicated SQL Server and One Combined server(WFE& app).