A challenge for IT Pro’s in SharePoint 2010 is getting to grips with the deployment options that SharePoint 2010 brings, this article deals with two considerations:

. Physical Architecture
. Installation and Configuration

A successful SharePoint Design includes not only the deployment pieces but also other key architectural pieces such as the Information Architecture, Applications Services, Web applications and the collaboration structure.

Physical Architecture
64 bit requirements for SharePoint 2010 and SQL Ensures you have sufficient resources to power the products and a minimum 8GB of memory is however recommended for SharePoint and 16GB for SQL, it is recommended that SQL Server is on its own server and clustered or mirrored for high availability. A single server could support your concurrent connections but does not offer resilience however SharePoint’s topology is flexible so you can easily add additional servers and scale services across them. Adding application services can change a physical topology such as Performance Point which due to its workload could be dedicated its own SharePoint Server. With more SharePoint Servers you will need to ensure your SQL server has sufficient resources available, 64 bit enables SharePoint to handle more requests making SQL now work harder.

Installation and Configuration
Installing binaries is the easy bit although you do need to be aware of where you are locating certain files such as the SharePoint data folder which by default locates the Index flat file which can easily grow to 10% of your content crawled. You can also automate the installation and farm configuration process by using PowerShell and the PSconfig tool which gives you much more flexibility in defining your naming conventions and service account for central administration.

TechNet Deployment Guides
Scripted Install Guide
Planning for Capacity

Steve Smith is a SharePoint MVP and owner of Combined Knowledge which specialises in Global Education on all aspects of SharePoint including how to correctly build and deploy. Find out more.

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