Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Hardware and Operating System Guidelines

Let’s start with the salient hardware and operation system guidelines that you should be considering:

Hardware/Physical Server:

Server sizing/CPUs—Physical (or virtual) servers that will host a SQL Server instance should be roughly sized to handle the maximum processing load plus 35% more CPUs (and you should always round up). As an example, for a workload that you anticipate may be fully handled by a four-CPU server configuration, we recommend automatically increasing the number of CPUs to six. We also always leave at least one CPU for the operating system. So, if six CPUs are on the server, you should ...