[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] How much ram? - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA
Sat, May 29 2010 22:39 bradley

How much ram?

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/99001

How much RAM for SBS 2008?  Bottom line 4 gigs is just not enough.  8 gigs may work for some small firms, but as that thread in the spiceworks forum indicates... the range that many are using ranges from 10 to 16 gigs for the server.

16 gigs may be on the top end... but 4 gigs is just not enough.

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# Depends on the client

Monday, May 31, 2010 4:16 PM by Joe Raby

We have clients that work easily with 8GB of RAM.  I use 4GB cuz our server runs Server 08 Enterprise as a Hyper-V host, and the hardware only has 6GB total....2GB for Hyper-V, 4GB for SBS.

It runs fine for us.  We only have 4 PC's and the only LOB app we use is our Quickbooks (Pro, not Premium) DB, which is quite small.  The desktop we run it on is an Atom all-in-one with 2GB of RAM.  The highest-end PC that we use in-house is a Core 2 Duo E8400 with 4GB RAM.

We don't have a dedicated server room with rackmounts.  It's a single box with a hardware 10K RPM RAID 5 (got the hardware from an Intel build party for uber-cheap!), but our server is used mostly just for email.  Sharepoint doesn't get a lot of use here, due to the size and nature of business that we do/get.  The hard drives rarely break a sweat.

We have clients on SBS with as few as 3 PC's.  We don't have a lot of 50+ seat clients that aren't already on a modular server setup.  We know better that SBS would fit just fine with them, but those larger clients are already into AD, and aren't going to do a complete rip-out of their setup to migrate to SBS - it's just not cost effective for them to re-strategize their entire IT over a multi-homed AD setup on Windows Server.