development Archives - Tristan Watkins on IT Infrastructure

Publishing a network-isolated virtual machine with RemoteApp

To understand the development environment design choices that this article pertains to, it may be worth glancing at the design section of my SharePoint development series before diving in, if you haven’t already followed those posts.

Cloning isolated VMs vs. scripted installation

One of the challenges we’ve always faced with SharePoint development has been the tension between cloning actually identical environments versus automating the deployment across distinct environments (or worse, repeating the installation manually). In the first case we save time by eliminating reconfiguration and this ensures a consistent experience for each user. This is particularly beneficial for software development. These benefits can also be obtained by scripting installation/configuration/deployment but there’s a considerable overhead associated with developing and testing those scripts. As SharePoint 2010 is still quite new and we’ve been working on projects for some time now, we didn’t have the luxury of waiting for those refinements and we needed to take advantage of these efficiencies as we had done with SharePoint 2007 projects.

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SharePoint 2010 (not) in a Workgroup

With SharePoint 2010 RTM looming, I’ve stumbled across an architectural change that may surprise some people – namely, that SharePoint 2010 no longer supports multiple-server farms without a domain infrastructure. In SharePoint 2007 it was possible to create SharePoint farms in a Workgroup, so long as all of the user accounts for the services and application pool identities were named the same and had the same password. You could even manage users with an Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) or Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) LDAP directory (albeit with some fairly limiting restrictions). However, it was possible to use these farms for testing or when an Active Directory infrastructure was undesirable (as some people see it in a DMZ). Now, it is still possible to do a Simple installation on a single server without full domain services, but it is no longer supported on multiple servers, and the Simple installation comes with its own planning considerations, to which I’ll return in a bit. First, there’s another wrinkle regarding the single server Complete installation.

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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… Continue reading “Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment — Part V: Guest Build”

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. Continue reading “Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment — Part III: Host image build and performance benchmarks”

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): Continue reading “Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment — Part II: Design”

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. Continue reading “Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment — Part I: Introduction and Objectives”