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Loading ...Last week I had the pleasure of attending a London SharePoint user group meeting at Microsoft’s offices in Victoria London. Michael Noel of Convergent Computing gave an excellent overview of building the perfect SharePoint farm.
Michael is one of the authors of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Unleashed
For larger user populations, SharePoint scales using multiple web role servers, query server, etc… That also provides the opportunity to have a production farm and an independent test/development set up. That can either be achieved with additional dedicated servers, or by making use of server virtualization. Microsoft server licensing allows for up to 4 instances of a virtual host on a server. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is an excellent option and cost effective, according to a number of conversations during the evening. Third party virtualisation is supported as well - see Knowledge Base Article 897615 – including VMware and Citrix XenServer. Michael’s advice was that not all roles should be virtualised, although the best candidate for virtualisation is the web frontend.
In anything but a smaller set up, the SQL database role requires a large amount of space, especially if versioning is turned on in document libraries (resulting in every version being stored). Likewise, reasonable hard drive space needs to be allocated to the index and query services. Given the continual fall off in hard disk storage costs, and increasing capacities, this shouldn’t present an issue in most deployments.
Michael suggested that the more memory and processor cores that can be given to SharePoint the better, in the following priority: the Database Role, the Index Role and lastly the Web/Query Role.
Something else to bear in mind is that 64 bit computing is now truly upon us, and a server refresh needs to be part of your strategic IT planning if you plan on running the latest Microsoft applications. The next version of SharePoint is x64 bit only. SQL Server 2008 is recommend, especially  if you require transparent encryption of databases for security (although that should only apply to high compliance environments).
There is relatively little complexity to the network-level security for SharePoint. Opening port 1433 on the firewall to let the SQL server talk to SharePoint servers is required, important if you are using the built in Windows firewall capability. Michael gave a number of recommendations for setting up accounts, and they are covered in the slides and the book.
Some analysts weren’t so convinced about SharePoint’s Web content Management capabilities (at least back in 2007), but things have moved on a great deal. There are third party applications to enhance search, provide backup management and also SharePoint-aware anti-virus products. From  the begining of April SharePoint Designer will be free, and there may well be some new tools too.
Something to remember with SharePoint is that it is a tool, and tools can be used badly as well as effectively. It isn’t uncommon to come across SharePoint installations that have turned into hundreds of information pockets, rather than an enterprise-wide collaboration tool. All too often, IT staff end up structuring set ups around organisational groups, rather than functional teams. The two things are very different, and achieve different results.
From my perspective, business should be careful not to use SharePoint to replicate departmental silos. Instead, it should be used to ensure that data and resources are both discoverable and protected.
The evening ended with a very extensive Q&A. If you want to develop your SharePoint skills, you might want to check out the April best practices conference. A number of tools that were discussed during the evening will be demonstrated there. Check out the site for details of the London conference.
SharePoint has certainly caught my interest again with its growing feauture set. There is still a long way to go for it to catch up with some of the more mature wiki systems, but the gap is definitely closing.
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