Preparing for SharePoint 2010

Back in June I and Mike Herrity visited Seattle where we had the opportunity to meet up with the SharePoint product team and also the Education team at Microsoft Redmond.  After a presentation to the SharePoint Product group we were fortunate to spend some time with Brenda Carter to discuss our thoughts for SharePoint 2010 in terms of our planned SharePoint Farm.  We intend to be early adopters of this platform so in readiness we have started to plan our architecture for this version. 

We have already started the planning and purchasing so we were very much ready for the public Beta which became available in November 2009. Along with a testing farm we have already planned a school demo site for people to try and see the power of SharePoint 2010 http://ict.twynhamschool.com/SitePages/Home.aspx. For this setup of our SharePoint farm we will be using Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 to deploy our web front end servers and with this in mind we have purchased three Dell Poweredge R710 servers with the following spec. In a future blog post I will run through the rationale of making such a significant purchase.

Server: 2x Intel Xeon X5570 Processor (2.93GHz, 8M Cache, 6.40 GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT)

To include RAM: 72GB Memory for 2CPU (18x4GB Dual Rank RDIMMs) 1066MHz

Hard Drives: 2 x 300GB SAS 15k 3.5″ HD Hot Plug

Within the Farm we will have 2 SharePoint front end servers and also an SharePoint Application server the big debate is whether or not to virtualize the indexing server with the processor overheads associated with the indexing service how will that work on our virtual servers  We have also purchased a Dell MD3000i with 2TB of storage which we can expand up to 10 TB for storage of our images and video files in readiness for the production setup of our farm  This server specification may seem over powered but these servers are not just for SharePoint as we plan to virtualise a lot of our server stock we have over the coming year so you will also see a post on Hyper-V R2.

 The biggest debate is whether to virtualize the indexing server or not, well the beta programme will give us the chance to try lots of different scenarios including a virtualized indexing server which I will tell you about in future posts. One other scenario we will try is a virtualized install of SQL 2008 to host our SharePoint databases this is something that Chris McKinley is not keen on but I do think that while we are going through the testing phase it would be worth considering and trying all installations types so hopefully we can report back on the best and worst.

Technorati Tags: HyperV, Server 2008 R2, SharePoint

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