SQL Server 2008 minimum RAM Configuration?

Question

I have SQL Server 2008 on a Windows Machine (64 bit OS) 2 Xeon CPUs 2.4 GHz each and 48 Giga of RAM.

There are 3 dataware house databases about 30 to 45 Gigabytes each that are being used for analytic purposes.

SQL Server and MS Visual Studio are the only Applications that we use on this Machine.

Now I want to setup a separate lower budget test machine where I can copy and run the same databases.

What is the minimum of RAM needed to reasonably work with the test machine in my case? Would 10 or 20 Giga suffice?

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Greetings from No Planet!

Answer 1

In my opinion (of course it depends on the load of your  data and many other things) a minimum should be no less 8-10GB RAM. But I hope you are aware that you need to set up  MAX memory parameter , so if the server has 16GB ram so MAX param should be 10GB...

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Best Regards,Uri Dimant SQL Server MVP, http://sqlblog.com/blogs/uri_dimant/

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Answer 2

Thank you! To what value should the admin set the Max param for RAM usage for the SQL Server that I described above  - it has an 48 Giga RAM.

Is there a rule of thumb, say MAX= 2/3 of the available RAM, as in your example?

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Greetings from No Planet!

Answer 3

Again just guessing 28-34 GB

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Best Regards,Uri Dimant SQL Server MVP, http://sqlblog.com/blogs/uri_dimant/

MS SQL optimization: MS SQL Development and Optimization
MS SQL Blog: Large scale of database and data cleansing
Remote DBA Services: Improves MS SQL Database Performance