Build SharePoint development farm
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Hi all,
Oh, I like the new preview feature!
After a short break I am back for a (short time)
(Actually busy on planning my wedding! Yes, am getting married, should've been a bit more formal announcement than adding it on this post! Ok, back to business.
My senior management approached me and asked me to get the pricing and setup a SharePoint development farm as they are getting SP dev team (new addition to our dev team- we are mainly on PHP projects). I am searching to find an ideal setup solution for the SP dev team.
One of the requirements I got was to have high end laptop for the developers (quad core, 32GB RAM) so they could develop the SP 2013 sites.
I am not sure which path to go with; get high end laptops for dev team and then get a mid size server for UAT or
get high end server which can run like 6 servers replicating the production environment (2 WFE, 2 App, 2DB), so we could build solutions and test it on most possible scenarios too. Our SP solution could range from small website to large websites/intranet portal
Also needs to decide on the storage part as well. I was asked to prepare 2 options, one with the best option and another with the minimum recommended option. Ideally I am thinking about good laptops for users+ a scalable server where we could fire up 2 vm for development (AD+SP) and then another group of vms for replicating clients production environment which might have exchange sever, ad, SP with multi tier server to do the deployment tests before giving it to the client.
Please share your thoughts.
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Which SharePoint version are you looking at?
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Sharepoint 2013
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A good article on sharepoint application life cycle management
http://zimmergren.net/business/automating-sharepoint-development-iterative-development-process
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@ambarishrh said:
Sharepoint 2013
I meant Foundation, Standard or Enterprise.
Have you considered Office 365?
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I was kinda wondering why O365 didn't seem to be on the table until I appeared that you are creating Sharepoint setups for clients, so that might not be possible on O365.
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" (Actually busy on planning my wedding!
Yes, am getting married, should've been a bit more formal announcement than adding it on this post! "
Congrats in advance!! -
Congrats on the upcoming wedding, by the way!
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@scottalanmiller Its SharePoint 2013 Enterprise and we might sometimes need to test with Exchange server for intranet projects as well
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@Joyfano said:
Congrats in advance!!
Thanks! -
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A single, large server is probably much better. That way production can steal capacity from testing for free. More flexible in the long run.
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@scottalanmiller Thanks!
I am looking at a server with the below specs.
2 Intel
Xeon E5-2690v2, 3.0GHz, 25M Cache, 8.0GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT, 10C, 130W, DDR3-1866MHz
128GB RAMThis way we could have the VMs fired up based on the solution required with multiple servers. Apart from that the usual things like TFS server, and a UAT server which will be always available.
The dev team each will have a Lenovo W540 laptop, Intel
Core
i7-4930MX (Up to 3.0GHz, 8MB L3, 1600MHz FSB),32GB,512 GB SSD. -
That's a good server spec. Lots of power. Should work well.
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An update on this:
We got the servers and that is also with a SAN. I had some discussions with the dev team head for SP and he would like to have a self provisioning system for VMs. Since this will now be staging, as all dev team members have good 32GB machines to be used as local development. So now my path of research is on going with these 2 servers as independent servers, which has 600GBx2 HDDs, will set it up with RAID1 so on the 600GB usable space on each server, 100GB will be given for OS and the second drive of 500 GB will have master images for self provisioning. Use the SAN shared storage for the VM storage and then boot up instances as and when required for the projects. Use Visual studio online as TFS account which is offsite so its easy for dev team to access from outside. I would like to keep a copy of the TFS online files as a local copy+ may be add Veam backup for the HyperVs for snapshot backup to our other netapp as a backup just in case if something happens to servers. Makes sense?
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I need to add some process after discussing with the Project Managers, just to ensure that we don't end up using 100% resources of servers and if something new comes i will end up terminating some to accommodate new ones. Idea is to ensure to have some policies like, x number of hours/days needed to fire up x type of SP farm (single server, multi server- 6 servers, 8 servers etc), If there are new projects coming in, share the infrastructure proposal with us, so we can check if there are rooms for this new setup, if not order new servers to provision etc.
