One question I often hear deals with evaluating Service Manager using the least amount of lab resources. You can use just one computer to evaluate Service Manager. Because you cannot install both a Service Manager and data warehouse management server on the same computer, you will use Hyper-V to create a virtual computer to host the data warehouse management server. Information about hardware requirements for Hyper-V is available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=143970
Know also that this configuration will not support a production environment and no scalability or performance estimates are provided.
The following diagram outlines what a minimum configuration might look like. Start with a physical computer running Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V. Make sure that the single dual-core CPU is compatible with Hyper-V. Of the 8 GB of RAM, 3 GB is used for the virtual computer that hosts the data warehouse management server. Make sure there is at least 200 GB of free space on the hard disk drive.
You will find this scenario, as well as others in the documentation that ships with Service Manager.