Hi Amith,
Probably best course of action is just to set to whatever, then contact your infrastructure people and ask them to monitor utilization. If you're constantly at 100%, add more, if you're constantly at less, reduce it down. Just fine tune it over a week or so and you'll have the right specs for your workloads.
As a curiosity because you're asking about hardware. What is your Application server like i.e. how many vCPUs/vRAM is provisioned to it or are you running it on physical hardware?
That said, and much more generally for Hardware Requirements (and I invite anyone and everyone to call out anything they'd do differently)...
Unless you are working with any significant graphical automations the only hardware you'd be considering would be CPU, RAM and storage. Though I would be curious about any GPU pass-through you're doing.
Outside of basic things like running MS Office, if you are doing anything super intensive you may need more RAM or a higher end CPU that what's outlined below.
Also a significant factor will be if you are running VMs or physical machines for each RTR. I have assumed that if you are using dedicated PCs you are not using workstation/HEDT grade hardware and would be using standard Dell type machines or similar.
CPUPhysical Resource: In terms of CPU, an older i5 will work fine i5-2400 and upwards. However if you are using newer hardware, any i3, i5 or i7 from 6th gen onwards will work perfectly fine with Windows 10 (32 bit or 64bit) and Blue Prism.Virtual Environment: If you are running VMs, 4 cores and 2.8 GHz.
Bear in mind though that not all Ghz are the same. If you have a 10 year old Westmere CPU from Intel running at 3Ghz and you compare it with a newer CoffeeLake CPU running at 3Ghz. The CoffeeLake CPU performs 30% to 50% more operations clock for clock so depending on your workload, a VM running a 10 year old Westmere silicon or older might struggle, whereas a Sandybridge/Broadwell/Skylake/CoffeeLake based CPU would be fine. If you're servers are less than 5 years old, this will be a non issue.
RAMSame for Virtual Machines and Physical Resources: For a run time resource (RTR), if you are running 32 bit Windows version you will want minimum 4GB of RAM. If you are running a 64 bit OS, 8GB of RAM will be recommended. RAM speed is mostly negligible for Intel PCs. So whether you're using standard DDR3(1333Mhz to 1600Mhz) /DDR4 (2133MHz to 2400Mhz), or fancy stuff at like DDR3 at 2400Mhz or DDR4 at 4000Mhz it won't make a material difference. If you don't know anything about RAM speeds or CL timings, you basically don't need to. Unless the CPU is being left idle because it cannot get data fast enough from RAM you don't need to worry and that would only be a concern if ideally your CPU should be at 100% utilization at all times which for basic office work is unlikely. To be honest, most of this paragraph is probably too in depth so...
4GB of RAM for 32 bit OS, 8GB of RAM for 64 bit OS. Any less than that and you are gonna start having slowdowns and suboptimal performance on lots of tasks.
Worth mentioning here that if you are running Windows 7 support from Microsoft ends in Jan 2020 so your organization will likely migrate to Windows 10 which I would recommend going with the 64 bit OS and min 8 GB of RAM.
Storage
10GB of space outside of the OS and essential applications should be fine unless you are working with giant files.
However, if your automation is doing a lot of saving of files(hundreds or thousands) or very large files (00s of megabytes) and that is having a significant impact on your runtime just waiting for files to be saved, it may be worth getting an SSDs instead of hard drives.
Cheers,
Ben
