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Our company plans to move on to SP2016 from SP2013.

For development we have a workstation for each developer like desktop Intel i5 4 cores + 8 GB (2x4) of RAM. For 2013 that machine was configured in next way: Windows 7 as host OS and VirtualBox virtual machine with 4 cores shared, 6 GB of RAM dedicated, 2GB left for host OS. On the host OS client side software is installed - browsers, Office, etc. On the VM the server side software is installed - the SP2013 as standalone installation, Visual Studio 2013.

The development scenario uses only one web application with several site collections, but we need SP on-premise and need to write C# server side code. Sometimes we need to run another VM's with ActiveDirectory or ADFS for specific cases or with old IE installed for testing.

By default the SP2013 eats almost all RAM, and it was optimized a little, like disable search and some other services not required for development directly. So average memory consumption was like 60-70% and up to 80% sometimes. On host OS memory consumption is always around 85-95%. And seems that both OS uses a swap file a lot.

We prefer to follow the same manner for 2016 - i.e. have a client OS with client software and VM with server, but looking in SP2016 Requirements - 16 or 24 Gb, seems that 6 Gb would be not enough, even with optimizations.

So the question is what would be the best for us to upgrade: as motherboard has 4 slots for RAM, we can add more 2x4 GB modules and have 16 GB in total, or add 2x8 and have 24 GB in total.

Also the same is for disk, now host OS is installed on some HDD, where the VM with server is also located. We plan to add an SSD and move host OS there, but not VM, we do not plan to install server on SSD (TLC becomes more popular) to not kill it very fast with continuous writes. May we stay with this?

The main goal is to have relatively comfortable conditions for developers.

This question is related to:

Minimum real world system requirements for SharePoint 2013

Setting up SharePoint 2016 development / learning environment - Cost effective

What environment do you have for SP2016 development?

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  • I would say you are mistaken regarding modern ssd lifespan. With features such as "apportion data on the whole storage" you can use it for many many years. I'm using SSD with VM (SharePoint ) at work for 2 years and at home SSD for everything (host OS, media files, etc, multiple VMs including SharePoint) for 3 years without problems. And expected lifespan is far far away of 2-3 years. Consider following article
    – Sergei Sergeev
    Nov 14, 2016 at 15:38
  • 1
    I'm a fan of giving developers everything you can. The more RAM the better. With less RAM you have SQL, Distributed Cache, App Pools, Services, etc all competing for RAM. If you don't have a lot it will result in lots of paging. Cap SQL RAM to a fixed amount so it doesn't eat everything it can. Also use 64k NTFS allocation units for SQL data/log folders. This is like the #1 performance gain you can do.
    – shufler
    Nov 14, 2016 at 19:25

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We have the Our dedicated low end machine for the SharePoint Development.But what we did, we install the Visual studio on the developers pc rather then on server.Everything run smoothly. what we have

  • C drive, 80GB
  • 16GB ram
  • Stop all the extra service( search etc)
  • Create a single Web application with multiple site collection.
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