Many IT professionals are looking toward next year with excitement, anxiously anticipating the release of SharePoint Server 2010 and wondering what they can do now to prepare. Although many details about SharePoint 2010 haven’t yet been revealed, the SharePoint product team has provided guidance on several items to help organizations plan for the upgrade. In addition, SharePoint Server 2007 SP2 includes tools that offer additional insight and configuration information.
Pre-Upgrade
You can take several measures to prepare your environment for SharePoint 2010 before its release.
System requirements. Servers running SharePoint 2010 will require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 or 64-bit Windows Server 2008. (Microsoft announced more than a year ago that SharePoint 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services—WSS—3.0 would be the last versions to support 32-bit Windows.) Although most rack-mounted servers produced in the past few years are 64-bit capable, most current installations run on Windows Server 2003 in 32-bit mode, which is insufficient for SharePoint 2010; you must run 64-bit Server 2008 in your production environment. Environments running 32-bit hardware will require upgrades. In addition, because Microsoft Virtual Server and VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) both support only 32-bit images, you’ll need Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or alternative virtualization software to host 64-bit images.
SharePoint SP2 or later. One of the first things you can do to prepare for SharePoint 2010 is upgrade your current installation to the latest service pack. Upgrading to SP2 or one of the newer cumulative updates will give you significant features to help prepare for SharePoint 2010. SP2 includes:
- PreUpgradeCheck—This key STSADM command provides guidance about upgrade requirements and determines whether an upgrade will fail, without making any changes to the current environment. The command is built on the best practices analyzer and is the best free tool available to help you understand the current state of your environment. I discuss the PreUpgradeCheck command in more detail later in the article.
- Read-only databases—Read-only databases provide uptime flexibility for both build-to-build and version-to-version upgrades. Providing read-only databases to users while other databases are being updated gives users access to data during the upgrade.
- Parallel upgrades—In the past, databases had to be upgraded serially; only one database per server could be upgraded at a time. Although some companies used more hardware to overcome this limitation, you now can upgrade many databases simultaneously, dramatically increasing the speed of built-to-build or version-to-version upgrades.
- EnumAllWebs—This command provides the entire site collection and information hierarchy of your environment. The XML output can be used either as a site map or for inventory.
- DeleteSite and Deleteweb—These two STSADM commands are enhanced in SP2 to include the force command for removing problematic site collections and webs. Orphaned sites and webs can be removed using the stsadm -o deletesite -force command.
- VariationFixTool—You can use EnumAllWebs to obtain the globally unique identifier (GUID) for sites with variation issues. The VariationFixTool command in STSADM lets you repair sites with variations that are out of sync.
SQL Server. For performance reasons, SharePoint 2010 requires a 64-bit OS and hardware for your web infrastructure, as well as for SQL Server. It also requires SQL Server 2008 or 2005. SQL Express 2008 and 2005 are free alternatives, but their lack of management tools makes issue identification difficult. SQL Server 2008 Standard or Enterprise Edition offers the best scalability, performance, and manageability. The edition you decide to use will likely depend on your high availability, mirroring, and database encryption needs.