SharePoint 2010 VS SharePoint 2013: Minimum Requirements

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.

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: