Hardware

Whether to virtualize or not is the question for many companies today. All components of FIM 2010 R2 can be virtualized. If you have chosen to virtualize your SQL servers, I guess every other service will be virtualized as well. A starting point for the discussion on virtualization is available at http://aka.ms/VirtualizationBestPractices.

If I have noticed one thing during my years as a consultant, it is that customers tend to give virtual machines only one virtual CPU. However, almost every FIM feature can benefit from multiple CPUs, and I would recommend giving at least two to three CPUs to your FIM servers, depending on how you co-locate different FIM features.

The FIM development server at The Company, for example, has two CPUs and 4 GB of RAM. If your test development server is to load and manage all your identities, you will likely need to add more RAM to that system.