Sharepoint 2013 - really need 24GB RAM?

R.O.S.S.I · 28 Feb 2013 at 20:05

Just been havinga look at possibly getting a Sharepoint site up and running at work and been reading on the minimum requirements on the Microsoft site and came across the following page...

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(v=office.15)

This looks to me as though its saying for the full shebang of Sharepoint 2013 running on your server you're going to be needing around 24GB of RAM to support it?

Is anyone using it? I find it really hard to believe its that much of a resource hog. Has anyone had any joy with running it on lower specs? We've already got an app server running SQL 2012, so we'd be just installing Sharepoint on its own brand new server.

I literally only want to set it up as a simple intranet for our company.

Spooter · 1 Mar 2013 at 11:19

It depends on the amount of users accessing SharePoint and what features you use. It also depends on how many servers you will have in the farm and what platform your running SharePoint on. Virtualized with shared cluster storage or Physical with optimized disk\raid configuration. I would try and keep SQL on a separate box for sure.

We have a web front end using 20GB Ram, Application Services server using 12GB and a SQL server using 12GB so that's 44GB ram!

If your going virtual at least you can easily adjust ram accordingly.

I literally only want to set it up as a simple intranet for our company.

To answer this you can probably get away with less. But why? The ram is cheaper than the licensing. SharePoint is very good at providing quick 80% solutions and you will most likely find your use of it grow. (Workflows, calendars, custom lists, alerting, document management etc...)

I would recommend you allow some growth..

Having said all of that.. What about the cloud version? No need for you to worry about the hardware or installation\patching?

R.O.S.S.I · 1 Mar 2013 at 18:04

Spooter said:
It depends on the amount of users accessing SharePoint and what features you use. It also depends on how many servers you will have in the farm and what platform your running SharePoint on. Virtualized with shared cluster storage or Physical with optimized disk\raid configuration. I would try and keep SQL on a separate box for sure.

We have a web front end using 20GB Ram, Application Services server using 12GB and a SQL server using 12GB so that's 44GB ram!

If your going virtual at least you can easily adjust ram accordingly.

To answer this you can probably get away with less. But why? The ram is cheaper than the licensing. SharePoint is very good at providing quick 80% solutions and you will most likely find your use of it grow. (Workflows, calendars, custom lists, alerting, document management etc...)

I would recommend you allow some growth..

Having said all of that.. What about the cloud version? No need for you to worry about the hardware or installation\patching?

Well at the moment we have around 40 staff split over 3 sites, it would literally just be used as simple intranet for all users. Some of the things I want to be able to do are....

Centralised room bookings (view/edit calendars)
Phone directory & contact list
Links to web based apps (located on app server)
Simple dashboard to get out important messages/reminders.
Centralised document store
IT quick help section.

I'm aware Sharepoint can do so so much more but I wanted to get a simple system set up and running before I looked at how we could utilise more of the product.

It'll be in a virtualised environment on an ESX host. We've got an App/SQL server which has 8gb allocated and gets by fine on that. Was hoping I could get away with similar for Sharepoint!

We get charity licensing so the CAL's and software cost aren't a massive issue but to be fair I haven't checked out any of the online versions. I guess I liked the idea of having it all on site and also allows me to expand my skills a bit learning to get it all up and running! Are there any recommended companies to go for with it?

oldbag · 1 Mar 2013 at 18:07

Have you considered office 365 over spending thousands on hardware and licensing and the hassle that comes with it (backup etc)?

brainchylde · 1 Mar 2013 at 20:30

oldbag said:
Have you considered office 365 over spending thousands on hardware and licensing and the hassle that comes with it (backup etc)?

This. CapEx days are over for most of us. OpEx is where the future's at.

That said, I'd be wary of scrimping where SharePoint is concerned. It has the ability to quickly turn into the elephant in the room.

oldbag · 1 Mar 2013 at 20:40

We use sharepoint on 365 at work and its rock solid, and very fast.

R.O.S.S.I · 2 Mar 2013 at 14:07

brainchylde said:
This. CapEx days are over for most of us. OpEx is where the future's at.

That said, I'd be wary of scrimping where SharePoint is concerned. It has the ability to quickly turn into the elephant in the room.

CapEx? OpEx? Sorry no idea what you're referring to. How does Sharepoint online work then if I want it as an intranet?

EDIT - quick google means you're referring to Capital Expenditure and Operational Expenditure.

R.O.S.S.I · 2 Mar 2013 at 14:20

oldbag said:
Have you considered office 365 over spending thousands on hardware and licensing and the hassle that comes with it (backup etc)?

The online pricing puts me off a bit, having a rolling monthly cost like that. The software and CAL's would only cost a few hundred pound for us which is a nice one off cost. Granted online is all done and set up and fully supported etc but like I said earlier, I'd like to be able to work through getting it set up myself (whether i'll live to regret that is another thing!)

We have a VM environment which should be able to run it so wouldn't really need any extra hardware, and not sure what hassles there are with backup? We backup our whole VM environment fine with Veeam not sure what other messing around there would be?

brainchylde · 2 Mar 2013 at 15:34

R.O.S.S.I said:
CapEx? OpEx? Sorry no idea what you're referring to. How does Sharepoint online work then if I want it as an intranet?

EDIT - quick google means you're referring to Capital Expenditure and Operational Expenditure.

Sorry - I should have been clearer. I was writing from my mobile.

R.O.S.S.I said:
The online pricing puts me off a bit, having a rolling monthly cost like that. The software and CAL's would only cost a few hundred pound for us which is a nice one off cost. Granted online is all done and set up and fully supported etc but like I said earlier, I'd like to be able to work through getting it set up myself (whether i'll live to regret that is another thing!)

We have a VM environment which should be able to run it so wouldn't really need any extra hardware, and not sure what hassles there are with backup? We backup our whole VM environment fine with Veeam not sure what other messing around there would be?

The online pricing shouldn't put you off. I suspect you are in a similar position to us with licensing - we have ours heavily discounted. But PLEASE, do not underestimate the behemoth that SharePoint is. You may very well be able to set it up on a single server, but as it grows, don't expect it to last and perform adequately. It is a complex beast and it'll come back to bite you. There is a reason organisations pay for SharePoint admins and teams of people to manage their SP platforms.

As for backups - it'll be the database which will be of primary concern to you. Veeam is fine for backing up VMs (great product, we do this), but you probably need a little more granularity with your SP backups. SCDPM is a good example of something that can do this - you can go in and recover individual resources from SharePoint sites.

SharePoint as an intranet using Office 365 - works in the same way as it does on site. Only difference is you set up a couple of ADFS servers and ADFS Proxy in order to do the integration and authentication with Active Directory.

Do it properly now and you'll reap the rewards, but I could point you at many failed SharePoint systems which is unfortunate because it really is a fantastic product. Take the complexity away for yourself and utilise the cheap cloud resource around you.

R.O.S.S.I · 2 Mar 2013 at 15:45

brainchylde said:
Sorry - I should have been clearer. I was writing from my mobile.

The online pricing shouldn't put you off. I suspect you are in a similar position to us with licensing - we have ours heavily discounted. But PLEASE, do not underestimate the behemoth that SharePoint is. You may very well be able to set it up on a single server, but as it grows, don't expect it to last and perform adequately. It is a complex beast and it'll come back to bite you. There is a reason organisations pay for SharePoint admins and teams of people to manage their SP platforms.

As for backups - it'll be the database which will be of primary concern to you. Veeam is fine for backing up VMs (great product, we do this), but you probably need a little more granularity with your SP backups. SCDPM is a good example of something that can do this - you can go in and recover individual resources from SharePoint sites.

SharePoint as an intranet using Office 365 - works in the same way as it does on site. Only difference is you set up a couple of ADFS servers and ADFS Proxy in order to do the integration and authentication with Active Directory.

Do it properly now and you'll reap the rewards, but I could point you at many failed SharePoint systems which is unfortunate because it really is a fantastic product. Take the complexity away for yourself and utilise the cheap cloud resource around you.

Some fair points mate thanks, still a lot to decide and take into consideration really, its not something I was just going to jump into anyway.
I think I'll play around with it a bit more in a test setup before I make the decision on what to do haha!

R.O.S.S.I · 4 Mar 2013 at 19:43

Haha you're not wrong about RAM usage.

Set up a stand alone copy on VM setup at home, assigned it 8GB to begin, and saw it was sitting at around 7GB pretty much straight away. Had a play on it for a while then decided to gave it 16GB and its currently eating just under 14GB of it.

Can't say i've noticed any performance increase from 8-16GB but it wasn't been particularly sluggish when navigating around it anyway so not sure exactly what the extra RAM is doing!

Definitely have to consider adding an extra 32GB of RAM to our ESX server if we do decide to go with an on-site version of it. Bonkers.

brainchylde · 4 Mar 2013 at 21:47

Do you have SQL on the same box/vm?

R.O.S.S.I · 4 Mar 2013 at 21:49

Its using SQL 2008 R2 that it installs as part of the stand alone install.

I rebooted the server as it had done some updates and its sitting happily at 12GB so not as bad as I first thought to be honest.

If I was to get this going at work we have a separate SQL 2012 server. I assume that the fact that i'm having to run SQL 2008 R2 on the same test box as the stand alone installation is why its eating into a large chunk of RAM?

brainchylde · 4 Mar 2013 at 21:58

Yes I would say so - SQL will tend to expand and use all RAM available. It's nothing to worry about, just how it uses resource.

PAz · 5 Mar 2013 at 09:40

You really should be setting upper memory limits on SQL, particularly on co located installations.