Tips for a successful migration to SharePoint 2013
We started this year all out migrating production farms from SharePoint Server 2010 to high availability servers in the latest version of the product, SharePoint Server 2013. With this migration we found some things we thought would be interesting to share with those of you who are considering (or already doing) a migration to SharePoint Server 2013.
This article doesn’t cover every issue related to SharePoint migration, but gives some pointers to be considered.
Requirement Changes
From the Hardware's point of view if we compare the Requirements for SharePoint 2010 and the requirements for SharePoint 2013, the first thing we notice is that the RAM amount needed for the Web servers increased. This is actually rather natural between version changes but it's something to bear in mind. An example for this is that in SharePoint Server 2010 you could configure an evaluation or development server with 4GB of RAM but in SharePoint Server 2013 this increased to 8GB, which is a significant increase. Also if we want this server to have integrated database we'll need 24GB of RAM. We have noticed this memory requirements increase in practice, since in this version the search service uses a significant amount of memory.
On the other hand by increasing the Web servers amount of memory we have to plan more free space in the hard drive, since it's recommended to keep free space in your HDD at least 5 times the RAM. In practice this means that if we have a SharePoint Web Server in production with 24GB of RAM the ideal would be to at least have 96GB of free HDD space or else SharePoint will alert us in the Central Administration....
Read the full article here: Tips for a successful migration to SharePoint 2013