Technical requirements
When planning the build of a new server, many of the decisions that you need to make are licensing-type decisions. What roles do you intend to install on this server? Can the more common Server 2019 Standard edition handle it, or do we need the Datacenter edition for our purposes? Is Server Core going to be beneficial from a security perspective, or do we need the full Desktop Experience? In these days of Hyper-V Servers with the ability to spin up virtual machines on a whim, we oftentimes proceed without much consideration of the hardware of a server, but there are certainly still instances where physical equipment will be hosting the Windows Server 2019 operating system. In these cases, you need to be aware of the requirements for this new platform, so let us take a minute to list those specifics. This information is available in longer form on the Microsoft Docs website if you need to double-check any specifics, but here are your summarized minimum system requirements (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started-19/sys-reqs-19):
- CPU: 1.4 GHz 64-bit that supports a number of things—NX, DEP, CMPXCHG16b, LAHF/SAHF, PrefetchW, and SLAT.
- RAM: 512 MB ECC memory minimum, or a recommended 2 GB minimum for a server running Desktop Experience. I can tell you that it is possible to install and run Desktop Experience with far fewer than 2 GB (such as inside a test lab), but the performance of that server will not be on par with what it could be.
- Disk: Server 2019 requires a PCI Express (PCIe) storage adapter. ATA/PATA/IDE are not allowed for boot drives. The minimum storage space requirement is 32 GB, but Desktop Experience consumes about 4 GB more space than Server Core, so take that into consideration.
Those are sort of the bare minimum specs if you just want to spin up Server 2019 and poke around at it. For production systems, increase these numbers by a lot. There is no magic answer here—the specs you need depend on the workloads you expect to throw at your server. There are additional components that it would be good to look for when building a new system that are required for particular roles and features as well. Things such as UEFI and a TPM chip are quickly becoming mainstream and used by more and more services with every operating system update. In particular, if you are interested in security and protection via BitLocker or working with strong certificates or the new Shielded VMs, you will want to make sure that your systems include TPM 2.0 chips.
