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I'd like to create three or four virtual machines on my Windows Server 2008 R2 OS (single server farm for now), and I'm wondering how much RAM to allocate to each virtual if the host has a total of 16GB (two 1TB hard drives) with plans to move to 32GB in the near future. I'd like to run SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, Exchange Server 2010, SharePoint Enterprise 2010, and Lync (probably run Exchange on its own virtual and Enterprise on its own virtual with SQL on the host). I'd also like to run SharePoint Server Standard and SharePoint Foundation (obviously all separate from Enterprise) for testing purposes, and I'm also wondering if the same SQL server and Exchange server can be shared by all three instances of SharePoint?

Thanks for any advice.

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I'd just break it down on what core products need what. I would use 4GB minimum for your live SP 2010 machine. We have a client with SP 2007 running 2GB and it runs at 75% Mem usage, which I would certainly not advise. If you're running Exchange 2010 SP1 with multiple roles, they recommend 8GB. With SQL the recommended for 2008 is 4GB, or 1GB with SQL Express.

You get the picture.

Depends what it is going to all be used for as well and what the traffic and content is likely to be. Ross

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  • Thank you! So is the best answer to add more RAM, above the 16GB, if we need to run all three instances of SP2010 on one physical server?
    – user1100
    Commented Jan 27, 2011 at 15:41
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You will probably have to separate out your SharePoint farms into separate SQL Server instances.

I remember hearing that SharePoint (for some reason) only likes to run on the default instance, but this might have been fixed in 2010. Someone else confirm?

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    You can have as many farms as you like using the same SQL Server instance, but it will get increasingly confusing the more you have.
    – SPDoctor
    Commented Jan 25, 2011 at 17:05
  • Ah, you learn something new every day ;)
    – James Love
    Commented Jan 25, 2011 at 17:17

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