SharePoint 2010 VS SharePoint 2013: Minimum Requirements

October 8, 2012

This post is about the Minimum Requirements for SharePoint 2013. I also contrast them with SharePoint 2010’s Minimum Requirements. This will also help you see if your current SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure is ready for an upgrade to SharePoint 2013.

Here they are:

Hardware Requirements

SharePoint Servers

SharePoint 2013’s Minimum Requirements are the same as SharePoint 2010’s. Here is a table that shows the Minimum Requirements for both servers.

UPDATE: Microsoft released a new “version” of minimum requirements for the SharePoint servers and they are much higher than the original. I took my info from the SharePoint 2013 IT Training, however the Technet Article has been updated OCT2.

Here are the new specs.

The only thing that changed is the RAM. Here are the new Minimum Requirements Explained in plain english

SharePoint Foundation 2013 (Development) : 8GB Ram

SharePoint Server 2013 Single Server Development or Evaluation (Application, SQL(optional), and Front End all on same server) : 24GB Ram

Web server or application server in a three-tier farm (Means SQL + Application + WFE), each Application Server and Front End need : 12GB Ram.

Database Servers

Similarly to the SharePoint servers, there is no difference between the Minimum specs required for the SQL server between SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013

Software Requirements

SharePoint Servers

Compared to the Hardware part, the Minimum Software Requirements for SharePoint Server 2013 are different from SharePoint Server 2010. For SharePoint 2013 you need:

Microsoft also released the Prerequisites that will be installed by the SharePoint prerequisite installer. This is very interesting if you want to do a complete offline installation. Here they are:

Database Servers

The minimum Software requirements for the Database Servers are also higher:

Looking to Upgrade From SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013?

As you see, the hardware specifications between the two are the same so you should have no problems on the Hardware side. However, Microsoft has really updated the Minimum Software Requirements for SharePoint 2013. So if you were running on the minimum for SharePoint 2010, you might have to consider a Database-Attach method or even creating a brand new Farm with the latest Software.

Is your current infrastructure ready for an In-place upgrade? or you have to completely update your Software?

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SharePoint Server

11 Comments

October 11, 2012 at 1:38 pm
Anoop Srivastav
No Sir, for production server minimum is 12 GB of RAM and for development server minimum is 24 GB of RAM 🙂 See below link –
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(v=office.15).aspx
Reply
- October 11, 2012 at 10:18 pm
  Vlad Catrinescu
  Thank you very much, I updated the article. I based my original article on the Technet Training for IT pros. However, I see in your link that it changed. Thank you very much for telling me :).
  Reply
July 9, 2013 at 1:26 am
Petri
My SharePoint Foundation 2013 is working on 4GB RAM and 1 CPU (2 core’s). Search Service is not in use, because it will use lot of RAM.
I have also SQL Server 2008 R2 installed on same computer. 🙂
Reply
- September 5, 2013 at 1:04 pm
  Ricardo
  Petri, hi!
  Did you experienced any problems running SharePoint 2013 on just 4Gb? How about the performance?
  Reply
  - September 5, 2013 at 2:27 pm
    Vlad Catrinescu
    Hey Ricardo, it will work but it will be reaaaallly slow. Especially, don’t start continous Crawl.. and you might have random “unexpected error” when accessing pages. Just Refresh and it will be fine.
December 2, 2013 at 11:14 am
Khushi
Hi there,
My firm is planing to upgrade from 2010 to 2013. I pulled the hardware and software requirement here (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485.aspx#hwforwebserver) It says the hardware requirement for
Web server or application server in a three-tier farm
Pilot, user acceptance test, or production deployment of SharePoint Server 2013 or SharePoint Foundation 2013. Processor is 64-bit, 4 cores.
with note: If you contact Microsoft Customer Support Services about a production system that does not meet the minimum hardware specifications described in this document, support will be limited until the system is upgraded to the minimum requirements.
When I shared this with my system admin. He mentioned that we never had a server with more than 2 Processor.
My question – Is 4 cores really MINIMUM requirement for PRODUCTION as well as staging environments? What minimum should we need on Development environment.
We will be having Windows 2012 on the application server. With Database SQL Server Enterprise 2008 R2 on Database server.
Thanks in advance.
Regards,
Khushi
Reply
- December 4, 2013 at 7:54 pm
  Vlad Catrinescu
  Hello There,
  I highly recommend 4 cores for any SharePoint 2013 Machine.. however for DEV you can be fine with 2. Be careful, since there is a big difference between processors and cores. A Blade Server which is usually your host has 2 processors, but each processor has 8 cores… so you got 16 cores on that machine!
  Reply
June 29, 2014 at 6:12 pm
Mrs Gee
Can you do a SP2013 upgrade with only SharePoint 2010 SP1 installed? I am getting mixed messages but all my internet searching is not convincing me that I need to be on SP2 to upgrade…?
Reply
- July 21, 2014 at 9:53 pm
  Vlad Catrinescu
  You can do it from RTM directly except the BI Service Applications!
  Reply
December 30, 2014 at 11:32 am
techvet
“Database Servers
The minimum Software requirements for the Database Servers are also higher:”
When I compare the two charts underneath that text, everything looks identical from 2010 to 2013. Am I missing something?
Reply
- January 26, 2015 at 7:02 pm
  Vlad Catrinescu
  I don’t know what happened there but you are right… and you’re the first one to see it! Well for SharePoint 2013 you need at least SQL 2008 R2 SP1 , but for 2010 you can go with SQL 2008 Sp2
  Reply