Installation Requirements for Windows Server 2008

Before installing of Windows Server 2008, make sure the hardware meets the minimum necessity of the OS and the tasks and applications you plan to use:

■ Memory: Windows Server 2008 doesn’t run without at least 512MB RAM. (if possible, you need at least 2GB.) For 32-bit, the maximum amount of memory is 4GB for Standard and 64GB for Enterprise and Datacenter. For 64-bit, 32GB of memory is the maximum for Standard edition or 2TB for Enterprise and Datacenter.

■ Disk: 10GB of space is a useful minimum, but there’s no breathing room. Shoot for 40GB minimum. If you run more than 16GB of memory, you need more disk space because of the paging and dump files. If you make possible to hibernation, consider that the hibernation file is the size of the memory amount.

■ Processor: The minimum is 1GHz for x86 processors, 1.4GHz for x64 processors, and Itanium 2 for Itanium-based installations.

Have a plan for your drive space. If you plan to use this system in a production environment, you must implement some kind of Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID). In most cases, the RAID will be hardware-implemented, and normally, you’ll use RAID 1 for the system disk. Before you install the OS, configure RAID on the server and update the basic input/output system (BIOS).

Decide how to logically divide the disk. If the server stores large amounts of data, do not store it on the boot volume where the OS resides. In the event of volume corruption, there are more controllable data subsets to locate and restore. (For example, restore only the OS volume but not the 300GB of data partitioned on its own volume.) Some products have their own disk best practices. For example, Exchange best practice requires placing transaction logs on different physical disks from the databases to limit the chance of failure affecting the logs and the database. If you have any Direct Attached Storage (DAS), a Storage Area Network (SAN), or access to Network Attached Storage (NAS), the data may reside on these solutions. Only the OS and binaries for services will be locally installed, so the OS can take up most of the local disk space. It is also common to place the paging file on a separate physical disk to minimize disk head movement on the OS/application drives related to page file activity.

If you intend to use BitLocker drive encryption, ensure that at least 1.5GB remains available as unpartitioned space. The storage is required as a special BitLocker system volume that contains the files needed to start the Windows OS load after the BIOS boots.