Hello All,

I wanted to see if anyone can help me with some direction on sizing a new Crystal Reports Server. I have looked online at but really cannot find anything other then system requirements and a 2008 sizing guide. We of course will be installing 2011 (which I believe with the latest patches is actually called 2013).

First a little about our environment. We currently have a Crystal Reports 2008 server in house. The issue we have with it, is it is really slow running reports (particularly populating the LOV's). We have had a consultant look at the reports and the server and they confirmed that we are getting the best performance we can out if it. It's just an old server. We use it to 1. send a few scheduled reports and 2. have our staff access it for order tracking information. We have a maximum of 5 concurrent users so it is not a heavily used server at all. The data source is a SQL 2012 Server which is new with a lot of power for what we use it for.

So my question is how best to configure the server. It is a dedicated server just for Crystal Reports. I plan to run Windows Server 2008 on it. Would CR2013 take advantage of more cores for single queries (because we rarely have more then one report being run at any time)? Because my choice there is two quad core processors or a single faster one plus $ put elsewhere. What hard drive configuration would be best? Mirror or Raid 5? Is the disk I/O a major factor in performance? Should I spring for 15K SAS drives and a performance RAID card or is it not too dependent on that?

The configuration I am currently looking at is as follows.
Xeon 5-2430 2.2 GHZ 15M Cache
16GB 1333 RAM
PERC H710 512 MB cache (upgraded RAID controller)
2 X 300 GB 15K SAS 6Gbps drives in a RAID 1 Mirror

I realize this is a lot of information I am looking for. Really I just want some direction. I appreciate anyone's thoughts.

Best regards,
Daniel Joaquin