Setting max server memory in SQL Server 2014 I have a SQL Server 2014 Standard Edition server running Windows 2012 R2, with 128GB memory.

I'm attempting to configure SQL Server to use max memory of 96GB, but it appears to not be working.

It is defaulting to 128 GB.  On the first attempt I did not catch it defaulting to 128 which resulted in  errors 233, 33086 and 17300 and "Wait on the database engine recovery handle failed". 

I've since uninstalled and reinstalled SQL Server, however I still cannot set max memory to less than 128...

I am using a service account created for running the database engine. No other features are installed.

The exact statement I'm using is:

EXEC sys.sp_configure N'max server memory (MB)', N'96' GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE GO




Right after I added the statement to my question I saw my mistake.
Aye aye. You are confusing megabytes and gigabytes (MB is even in the configuration name!).

EXEC sys.sp_configure N'max server memory (MB)', N'96' --&lt;-- this is 96 MB
GO 

EXEC sys.sp_configure N'max server memory (MB)', N'98304' --&lt;-- this is ~96 GB
GO