Hi,

For the cost saving you should have to go with virtual machine, but the CPU and Memory are depends on your application and DB use's.

SQL Version also depend on the application and data critical. you can select best suited from enterprise, Standard and other version of SQL.

For the best practice, you should have the below drive configuration.

Drive for Binary files ..you can allocate 5 GB for it

Drive for the SQL data files ....depend on the application requirement(Let's say size is X GB)

Drive for the SQL Log files.....50% for the X GB

Drive for the Temp DB....40% of the X GB(Again it is also depend on the application uses....also you can have separate drive for Temp data file and Temp Log file)

apart from this you should have the two service account to run the SQL Services. one for SQL Service and one for agent service.

After installation you should enable the DAC login on the system.

create the login required by the application team with appropriate right.

Hope this help's. 🙂