How Much Memory and Disk Space Will My Server Need?
Number of Users
The correlation between the number of users a server will be supporting and the amount of memory needed is very high. A server whose number of users consistently exceeds the amount of memory available will see performance suffer as the server has to tap into utilizing hard disk drive storage space for virtual memory, which is considerably slower than physical memory.
As a result, the amount of memory in a server directly impacts the number of concurrent users that it can support, as well as the number of applications the users can concurrently use to interact with the server.
An important consideration, though, is the maximum amount of RAM the server's operating system can utilize. As an example, the standard editions of Windows Server, including Windows Server 2008, can only support a maximum of 4 GB of RAM, whereas the enterprise and datacenter editions can scale from 32 GB up to 2 TB, depending on the specific version of Windows Server used.
When it comes to storage space, many organizations initially gauge their server's amount of storage based on the number of users the server is expected to accommodate, but the correlation between storage space and users isn't as high as the memory side of the equation. A more important gauge of how much storage is needed involves the types of demands users are expected to place on the server.
