First off let me make clear that I am -not- a dba. I'm a Windows server admin so I don't know anything about queries or other SQL specific stuff. So when people tell me to "check this" or "do that", it has to be simple and done via the SQL Server Management Studio.
The server is running Windows Server 2012. It's a VM running in Hyper-V and the VM has 4 CPUs and 16GB RAM. SQL is 2012 Enterprise. There are 3 databases or database instances (I don't know the difference) running on the server one of which is SharePoint and the other 2 are specific programs that probably no one has heard of (I wouldn't if this company wasn't one of my company's clients) but I don't think that matters.
We started having problems which I can't relate because frankly SQL has me confused from the word go. I can handle Windows just fine, but SQL is a beast all its own. It could be because the server was running 12GB of RAM and yet Task Manager shows memory usage constantly above 90%. So we upped the RAM to 16GB and then I found that the SQL memory can be limited so I went into the Management Studio and started capping the upper memory limit. For SQL itself I capped it at 12GB so the OS would have room. I then went into each db or instance, whatever, and capped them at something around 800MB. That probably wasn't the right thing to do but I looked in the Task Manager of the server and it showed each db consuming a certain amount of RAM so I put the cap above what the Task Manager showed.
Since then I've gone in to each db (or instance) and upped that upper memory limit to 8GB for 2 of them. However, I can't get connected to the third. The service for it isn't started and I can't start it. I get the error that "Windows couldn't start the SQL Server (db name) on Local Computer, see the System Event Log. If this is a non-MS service, contact the vendor and refer to code 3417". When I look in the System Log it says that the service terminated with the error "Warning: you have until SQL Server (db name) to logoff. If you have not logged off at this time, your session will be disconnected, and any open files or devices you have open may lose data."
In the Application Event log, I'm getting errors 701 (There is insufficient system memory in resource pool 'internal' to run this query.), 3417 (Cannot recover the master database. SQL Server is unable to run. Restore master...), and 18053 (Error: 912, Severity: 21, State: 2. (Params:). The error is printed in terse mode because there was error during formatting. Tracing, ETW, notifications etc are skipped.). I've looked them up but what I find doesn't help me, probably because it's in dba language.
In Management Studio when I try to connect to the db, I can't of course and the error indicates a problem with Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to the SQL Server (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 2).
What in the world am I supposed to do with this?
Jonathan