SharePoint Server 2010 in a Server Farm : Allocation Of Physical Resources

SharePoint Server 2010 in a server farm can be bit tricky to deploy . Off course some of issues are typical to beta products , but there are other factors that require some good planning. One of these factors is allocation of Physical resources in order to get the optimize performance out of SharePoint. Let me share my experience on what configuration works fine for me. 

As I was doing all the work on Laptop  and using Hyper-V , its important to realize that the first limiting factor will be available RAM , then come processing power (mainly number of processor’s and their speed ) and  finally the Hard Disk (Speed + type). You cannot expect much from a laptop , but I end up with decent specification, which I think are good enough . I will suggest one thing , try to have multiple Network Cards  , not a absolute must but it helps in some advanced scenarios. Anyways following  is the basic configuration.

• RAM: 12 GB
• Hard Disk : 500 GB (7200 RPM)
• Processor : Intel Core 2 Duo T9600  @ 2.8Ghz

Now  this is how I initially (well I will tell you why I need to change it) configure it for SharePoint 2010 on Hyper-V. As the Host OS is Win 2008 Server R2 , it will not be happy if you give it less that 2GB of RAM , and with this you are not suppose to do any thing on Host OS other than running VMs , I recommend 3 GB  which seems much better.

• Domain Controller (DC)  :  2 GB
• SQL Server  (DB Server) : 2 GB
• SharePoint WFE : 4 GB
• *Windows 7 Client  : 1 GB ( Not require for Server Farm ,  but good to have when work with SharePoint Designer 2010 + Office 2010 + SharePoint Workspace …. )

For Installing SharePoint Server 2010  you will need AD (technically you can use other types but unless you want to test that area , don’t bother) , What I did is , I put a dedicated VM for a DC, I gave it generous 2 GB in the start but during installation of SharePoint I hit error (not remember that exact one but I do remember I found solution at Jie Lie blog  , within a readers comments , and fix was to give the SQL box enough RAM , and by enough means >3GB ) soI change the configuration as follows

• Domain Controller (DC)  :  1 GB
• SQL Server  (DB Server) : 3 GB

After this , the SharePoint Server 2010 installation went smooth.  Following is screen shot showing all the VM’s running .

I also planned and used , Internal Network option for Hyper-V VMs , so that all the machines uses it , they are all on same domain with dedicated IP’s. One glitch is that I don’t have internet available for this network. This poses a challenge  while installing SharePoint 2010 , as it will require you to install pre-requisites from internet. The work around is to download all the pre-requisites before hand , and install them before installing the SharePoint Server 2010 . You still need to run the pre-requisites checker , it will check the required  software’s , and if you had installed all the pre-requisites properly , it will display the list showing that they are already installed. Here is blog entry from Jie Lie listing all the pre-requisites and from where to download them. 

I really didn’t hit any other issues resulting from limited resources , and from software side following blog posts and link  makes things extremely easy.

SharePoint 2010 Installation

http://blogs.msdn.com/opal/archive/2009/11/16/installation-notice-for-sharepoint-2010-public-beta.asp

http://technet.microsoft.com/es-pe/library/ee805948(office.14).aspx

SharePoint 2010 Profile Synch

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/11/18/path-to-user-profile-synchronization-success-in-sharepoint-2010-beta.aspx 

Now I am planning to add another server containing  “FAST Server Server 2010” , I am sure it will require me to limit RAM from some of the existing VM’s .

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Originally published on WordPress on 2009-12-21.