Small Business Server 2011 with only 4GB RAM

If you follow minimum requirements you would allocate 8GB ram for a virtual machine just to evaluate Small Business Server 2011.

Although the motherboard on my Hyper-V system should take this in it stride the jump from its current 8GB to its 16GB max is expensive.

So do I need 8GB to evaluate SBS 2011? I couldn’t if I wanted to as Hyper-V needs some RAM so I gave it 6GB and it fired up. What about 4GB SBS 2008 worked on this and the only reason 2011 wants 8GB is Exchange 2010.

Here is a shot of my task manager running with 4GB of memory and the Exchange Console running. Onwards with the evaluation.

I have also stopped WSUS from downloading but not disabled it.