In the first five parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build, automated deployment and the guest virtual machine build. In this post I review some of the questions and issues we’ve encountered after a few months of working this way and some overall reflections on the approach. read more »
December 1st, 2009
Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part VI: Issues and Results
Client applications, Consultancy and Design, Networking, Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 
1 Comment »
November 27th, 2009
Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part V: Guest Build
In the first four parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build and automated deployment. In this post I describe a SharePoint 2007 virtual machine build.
Where’s the SharePoint 2010 build?
In short, we’re working on it. I’ve produced a new SharePoint 2010 beta virtual machine for this environment but we’re not yet ready to publish build guidance. Stay tuned. Additionally… read more »
Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | No Comments »
November 16th, 2009
Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part IV: Automated deployment
In the first three parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build. In this section I will look at automating deployment of that host operating system. This is lengthy, but there’s a lot to cover.
Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 2 Comments »
November 6th, 2009
Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part III: Host image build and performance benchmarks
Having agreed the project objectives and designed the system, I turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build. This is a high-level build guide with start-up time and baseline memory consumption benchmarks at key milestones. These benchmark figures were taken from the Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate build and are admittedly a bit imprecise. However, they do provide an overall indication of system performance as things were added to and removed from the installation. Although I do not have precise figures on RTM improvements, I spot-checked a few of these benchmarks when I rebuilt the system on RTM. Start-up times improved slightly at each milestone. In fact, the final benchmarks came in at 100MB less idle memory used in the RTM release. read more »
Consultancy and Design, Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 1 Comment »
November 5th, 2009
Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part II: Design
In the first part of this series, I introduced the pros and cons of various SharePoint development approaches and the objectives of this system redesign. In this part I will focus on design choices and conclusions, starting with the core technology.
Why we’ve chosen Hyper-V
There are broadly five decisive factors: performance, management features (like snapshots), cost, 64-bit OS support and a full host OS (not just a virtualisation administration console): read more »
Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 5 Comments »
November 4th, 2009
Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part I: Introduction and Objectives
As I’ve alluded to a few times in this blog, over the last few months I’ve led the consultancy and system design for a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment built on Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2. This series of six posts will reveal the key decisions and will consolidate recommendations from a broad range of research and guidance. This first post offers a technology-agnostic introduction to the problem, pros and cons of alternative approaches and what we hoped to achieve with the new approach. The design decisions will be covered in more detail in the second post, followed by a deeper look at detailed build guidance. read more »
Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 2 Comments »