Planning of moving to SharePoint 2010?
If the answer is yes, then start planning on upgrading your hardware.
How much hardware?
That's hard to say specifically but let me throw out a number... 3x
What? You're telling me that I need 3x the hardware to move over to 2010?!?
Yes and no. Let's look at how we can set up a rule of thumb designed to help establish expectations for those planning to rollout 2010.
Before you hit that delete button while you're muttering "Maurice has lost his mind", let me point out a few things to help illustrate this rule of thumb.
First and foremost, SharePoint 2010 is big. It has more features and certainly does things considerably different than any of its predecessors (look at the new services architecture).
A "demo" install of SharePoint (aka single click, single server) of SharePoint 2010 when stacked up against the current version clearly points out that infrastructure side of the application is considerable larger. Remember the days when a 2007 MOSS install looked huge? And how nowadays it just looks "normal"? Well, 2010 now looks huge. More databases, more accounts, more services, etc.
Want another measure of growth? From a developer's point of view, the API has also grown tremendously. You now have the CSOM, Sandbox solutions, REST, more features, more this and that... simply put, the number of things you can do has grown well beyond a 3x factor.
All of this consumes resources - in the form of disk operations, memory, cache files, etc.
Step back and look at what you have today...
Some folks will honestly find that migrating/upgrading their SharePoint 2007 system over to 2010 is not a big hit on their hardware budget. Why?
They planned for growth and probably bought machines that were much beefier than they needed at the time. These folks probably looked at a 5 year growth plan. If they kept a measured growth rate, chances are they have extra room on their system to accommodate the new version w/o having to do much. If they are lucky, the may need to buy a server, upgrade disks, upgrade ram.
Let's call these folks Type 1 systems.
Some folks probably looked at a smaller growth plan of about a year, if at all. These folks will find that upgrading to SharePoint 2010 is possible on current hardware, but that system performance and/or time to upgrade is pretty darn bad. They will most likely need to buy several different servers to appropriately build out their new farm.
Let's call these folks Type 2 systems.
Finally, there will be some folks that stood up SharePoint 2007 on whatever was available at the time. They had no real plan for improvement other than "buy more hardware". In fact, some of these folks might still be using x86 servers.
Let's call these folks Type 3 systems.
And now look forward...
Now, let's start looking at what your farm does today versus what you want to do tomorrow... and you have to ask yourself the following questions:
- Looking at your system today, how would you categorize your current day farm (Type 1, 2 or 3)?
- How much breathing room do you have with your current implementation?
- What do you want to optimize (or tweak) using the new services architecture?
Bear in mind, that Microsoft is still in the process of producing capacity numbers. This is all really very new. However, I think we can start to paint an expectation of how much hardware you will need to buy in order to accommodate SharePoint 2010.
Here's how I roughly see things breaking down with one big assumption: keep things on a fairly even level of service.
|
System qualification |
Rough hardware requirements ** |
|
Type 1 |
1.5x - 2x |
|
Type 2 |
2x - 4x |
|
Type 3 |
> 4x |
** This is a fuzzy table. I know my descriptions may not map very well to your exact scenario. So use this as a rough guideline for same service levels.
The reality is that most folks will probably not fit into the Type 1 scenario outlined above. Only the most recent or best planned (and executed) growth strategies will actually see a 2010 rollout as requiring minimal hardware.
Type 2 systems are probably going to be the majority of systems out there. A few systems will be ready for the hardware acquisition because they already saw the writing on the wall either because their system is growing or they've been planning on the version upswing. Other systems out are probably going to take the opportunity to move older, less performance-oriented systems out to the pasture; thus, infusing better machines alongside the version upgrade. It's safe to say you can probably expect an average 3x hardware requirement.
Type 3 systems are completely in the reactive category. Yes, there are still folks out there happily rendering pages on 32-bit hardware. Yes, there are folks out there that used the spare machines that nobody wanted. In short, SharePoint was put on the minimum hardware because it wasn't seen as important service. Chances are that now SharePoint is business critical. Now it's time to uprade and the price is going to be pretty steep.
Another way of looking at ... draw a bell curve right across the top of the table. T1 and T3 sit on the tails, T2 sits in the middle of the bell. Where do you fit?
What are the lessons that we can take from this discussion?
- You will need more hardware.
- Capacity planning is critical. If you haven't done it in the past, put it on your To Do list. It will not make the cost of any upgrade go away, but it can lessen the cost over time. Type 3 systems should make it a goal to never be a Type 3 again.
- If you're a system that is utilizing Virtualization, don't assume you can just create more VMs. I've seen too many folks basically throw out all good planning with one simple statement of "we'll spin up another VM". VMs are great, but you need to account for the impact of a new VM against other guests as well as the carefully examine the impact on the host system. Consideration should be given for more VM hosts.
- You will need more hardware - for your developers. It's probably very fair to say that most developer machines (especially laptops for the road warriors) need some major love. Last month at the MVP summit, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many folks had new laptops. Why? Well, it basically boils down to one small fact - SharePoint 2010 needs the extra horsepower. Laptops and dev machines that are more than say 12-14 months old will need more ram/cpu/iops.
As I mentioned in the table above, the range of hardware costs is really intended to address same levels of operation and configuration. If you decide to leverage the new service architecture to build a services farm or some other variation of service offloading, then it should be pretty obvious that your hardware costs are going to be much higher. :)
Summary...
Assess your current day system. Focus on building a good capacity plan for tomorrow's system. Plan on acquiring more hardware - the rule of thumb is that you will need more hardware no matter what you do.
-Maurice