Microsoft’s
hardware requirements for Windows Server 2012 are
absolutely ridiculously low.
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hardware Requirements
Yikes! Throw a
32GB boot drive in my Intel Atom based pfsense appliance and the
minimum specifications have been exceeded! I can tell you, Windows Server 2008
R2 on the Atom is a painful experience, so go get something faster if you are
building a Windows Server 2012 machine. Sure, the Windows Server 2012 hardware
requirement specs say you can do it, but would you really want to? I tried this
with the release candidate and reached the same conclusion, spend a few dollars
more and do not go Atom with Windows Server 2012. Note, I do have a very
different opinion on the viability of the Atom platform for things like Linux
web servers, but for Server 2012, get something a bit better.
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hardware Recommendations
I decided to put
together a quick guide in terms of hardware recommendations. Although I am an AMD
Opteron user, I do find it very hard to recommend that platform at the moment.
AMD’s main differentiator is being able to scale to quad processor (4P) systems
with the same CPUs and not incurring a huge premium. Unfortunately, software
companies are doing per core and per CPU licensing so adding more slower cores
and processors does not mean it is less expensive to do so. One of
these days (hopefully) AMD will get competitive again, but as a note to AMD
from a loyal user, you need to get back into the game. Here are my ballpark
recommendations:
Windows Server 2012 Hardware Recommendations
Looking at this,
there is a huge envelope to push one way or the other in terms of hardware.
Some installations will need more or less, but the big theme here is to get
hardware that matches the software you are purchasing. One example might be for
a big Essentials installation, the Intel Xeon E5-1650 is an interesting choice,
especially as one can use more than 32GB of RAM as they are limited to with the
Xeon E3-1200 series, but one can just as easily go with two big CPUs. Then
again, it is easy to end up with more CPU and memory than you are going to use
given licensing.
For those
wondering, I did start a building a Microsoft Windows Server 2012 thread in the
forums so feel free to discuss your build ideas there.
