Since begin of August, I’ve tried to research what are the minimum system requirements for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016. First I’ve published one post about it, but I’ve deleted it. It wasn’t completed. Now, I have the freshest tested information and I hope everything will be fine in the production, as well.

In this process I’ve checked only NAV and Web Server and Windows Client requirements. You can find all my conclusions in following text. But you must to know, there are not officially requirements; these requirements are based only on my testing.

Supported Operating Systems (Server and Windows Client)

First, NAV Sever works only on 64-bit edition of operating systems. I’ve concluded that these OS are completely qualified as base for NAV and Web Server:

• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows Server 2012
• Windows Server 2012 R2
• Windows Server 2016 (Technical Preview 3)
• Windows 7
• Windows 8
• Windows 8.1
• Windows 10

You can see I’ve also checked installation on next Windows Server release – Windows Server 2016 (Technical Preview 3) and everything was working fine.

Older OS as Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 also require some additional software as Windows PowerShell 3.0. You can download Windows PowerShell 3.0 as part of Windows Management Framework 3.0.

Also, all these operating systems require enabled Windows Search. If this is not enabled on your server, you can do it adding new Windows Search role in Server Manager.

If you want to run Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 Windows Client, you can do it on the same operating systems, but you can do it on both of them, 64-bit or 32-bit editions. If you install Windows Client on some of the 64-bit edition OS’s, you will get two Windows Clients (32-bit and 64-bit); 64-bit will be by default, but you can change default client as well. But if you install on 32-bit OS edition, you will get only 32-bit Windows Client. I will explain more about it in new post.

SQL Servers

The same situation is as for OS, SQL Servers also require 64-bit editions only. You can use NAV 2016 on following SQL Servers:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (SQL Server 2008 R2 is out of mainstream support, but I’ve tested NAV 2016 and in my tests everything was fine; but I think we have to make more tests in any case)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012
• Microsoft SQL Server 2014
• Microsoft SQL Server 2016 CTP2.2
• Azure SQL Server

You can see that I also check installation on next SQL release – Microsoft SQL Server 2016 CTP2.2 and everything was working fine. This will be helpful in the future with information about new Windows Server.

About using NAV 2016 on Azure SQL, I have to say much more. It is a really good news and I will write a new post only about it.

Hardware sizing

All of these configuration I’ve checked, have worked with minimum 1,75GB RAM.

REMARK:

As I already said, these are not officially Microsoft system requirements. These are information based on my personal testing and they will maybe be different in officially release.