Saturday, August 15, 2009

Preparing for SharePoint 2010

I recently installed Windows 7 on my new laptop that I got for work. The ultimate goal is I want a machine where I will be able to run SharePoint 2010 to do local development. The core requirements that everyone has been hearing about for SharePoint 2010 is:

  • 64 bit
  • Server 2008
  • 8GB RAM minimum

These requirements are going to be pretty taxing. A lot of the mid level companies have been able to install SharePoint 2007 and do some effective solutions. They were able to upgrade using their SharePoint 2003 environment or similar infrastructure which they already had. Many times clients have tons of performance problems even with SharePoint 2007 because they did not have sufficient hardware provisioned but that is beside the point. Thinking about it a little deeper, this probably should not be too big of deal given that many organizations have server virtualization and hardware itself continues to drop in price. So getting to this requirement is possible. I am looking forward to finding out why the server requirements changed.

However who this hurts the most are the developers. All Microsoft consultants that I know, that work with SharePoint, use localized virtual environments. This is going to hurt our ability to develop in remote environments significantly. We need to be able to do localized development and then build solution packages which we deploy into integration, quality and production environments.

Luckily I was told that my new laptop can have an additional 4GB added getting me up to 8GB. So my solution will be to add more RAM, Server 2008 virtual machine and set it up as a dual boot since I am running Windows 2007 64 bit as my host operating system. Still this is just going to be a really tough thing for most of us to get around.

2 comments:

Andrew Moore said...

One thing to keep in mind on the 8GB memory requirement. That was specified for a pre-release version of SP 2010. Pre-release software typically has much higher memory requirements because memory optimization comes later in the development cycle. It's likely that the specifications for the final release will include a much lower requirement for memory.

Chris O'Connor said...

Also, there is still a gap in the "VM" story - as there is no way to run a 64-bit OS (like SP-2010) - using any of the Microsoft products - like Virtual PC.

Supposedly, dev's can install SP-2010 on Windows 7 (locally) - NO THANKS !

The choice at the moment (as I can tell) will be :
(a) Windows Server 2008 - as a base O/S - and HyperV
(b) use something like VMWare

What WOULD be good is if Microsoft could allow for HyperV on Windows 7 !!

Will wait and see, I guess...