Do we need to have the same system specs for both our staging and production instances?

[Philippe Letendre]

If we can configure our staging server with less resources than our production server will we still be following jira's best practices? 

Our production server has 8GB of RAM and 4 CPU's. 

Would like to know if we can configure the staging server with less resources: 4GB of RAM and 2 CPU's. 

Would this cause any issues other than having the HW configured differently and the HEAP size adjusted to different settings on both servers? 

*both are VMs running on ESX server 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Depends on what you expect to use staging for.

If it's for performance tests, failovers, hardware changes etc, then yes, you should get as close as possible to production.  If it's for testing changes to config inside the applications, then you can be a lot more relaxed about the exact spec - your main use is not that hardware bound.  I've seen places with three - production, system staging (doubled as the failover system, and used for testing massive system level change), and config staging, running on something totally different!

[Josh Steckler · Accepted solution]

It depends on your goals. If you plan to do performance or load testing then yes.

But otherwise, you can have a less powerful system for non-production. This is how I usually do things.