What is the recommended size for a server 2008 system partition?
Solution 1:
It depends... According to the official system requirements (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/system-requirements.aspx) 32-bit installs of the OS need at least 20GB, while 64-bit installs require at least 32 GB. The OS itself takes up about 10GB if I recall correctly, but you need to factor in:
- Page file (typically 1.5x your physical RAM)
- Over 15% free space so that you can defrag
- Space for any applications you may install
- Space for the dump file (1x your physical RAM)
- Space for log files
With hard drives being as cheap as they are these days, I would recommend not skimping on space for the OS partition. Give yourself some extra room for things you forgot to factor in... it is much easier to allocate the space up front than it is to make space a year from now.
Solution 2:
As far as cleaning up the Winsxs directory... don't. You will break future updates, MSIs, and Windows Update from working.
See more here: http://blogs.msdn.com/jonwis/archive/2007/01/02/deleting-from-the-winsxs-directory.aspx
Even better... from the Windows 7 Engineering team, everything you need to know about Microsoft's engineering goals around disk space and the real size of the sxs folder (it's not as big as you think):
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/11/19/disk-space.aspx