Best Practices to plan and configure your SharePoint Farm across corporate infrastructure

In my previous post I described list of documents you need to manage for your SharePoint engagement.

In this post I’d like to publish my “best practices” for planning and configuring your SharePoint Farm across organizations. There are number of documents, describing such requirements for SharePoint Farm, but those documents are usually writing without taking into account your infrastructure scope. You never install SharePoint in isolated environment, and what you setup is usually interfere with the whole organization strategy and infrastructure design.

Infrastructure

1. Inspect your organization network topology to know where all application servers are installed (AD, File Server, Mail Servers and etc) and location of networ services  – firewalls, proxies and etc;
2. Find out all hardware devices – accelerators (WAN, XML), routers and etc. across your network. This information affects your selected SharePoint Farm topology.
3. Find out the person who administrate corporate firewalls. Firewalls affect the SharePoint farm design from the very beginning and you need to open number of ports during configuring farm.
4. Plan your farm topology – intranet and extranet, based on the info gathered earlier. I usually prefer to achieve “6+ server farm with Back-to-back perimeter topology with content publishing”, with some variations, depending on the client’s requirements. I like this topology, because it provides good availability, reliability and security.
5. Measure the latency to different SharePoint Server Role boxes (Query, Index, and etc servers) according your design to reorganize your boxes and Server Roles to have the fastest response time and design your SharePoint farm properly.
6. Install Microsoft Office 2007.
7. Install all Windows Updates and Service Packs.
8. Start SharePoint installation with WSS/MOSS + SP1 integrated. Don’t go with WSS/MOSS installation and then applying SP1, because this way has some issues  – small bugs with installing future updates
9. Check if SSL works (open SharePoint Office Web Service via https://), if not – don’t go further till you fix it. This is very critical stuff, because otherwise your can’t set SharePoint roles on other boxes in your farm. I had some negative experience in this area, when you can’t use other boxes in your farm and only Application boxes are available for Index and Query roles, because SSL was broken.
10. Install the latest Infrastructure Upgrade after you setup your farm (August at the current moment, not July), But be careful and refer to documentation how to do it correctly (start with WSS Upgrade and only after install MOSS upgrade). Follow the right sequence of installing all updates Service Pack->The latest Infrastructure Update –> All the latest Cumulative  Updates. Refer to this detailed instruction
11. Don’t install different SharePoint hotfixes, if they are not published in Infrastructure Updates or Cumulative Updates.  Do it, only if you have very specific problems which really cause you troubles. Those hotfixes are temporary solution before the next Infrastructure Update, and they are not properly tested.
12. Check if SSL for SharePoint Office Web Service works again.
13. Plan how much site collections and sub sites you need. I prefer to have one site collections with number of sub sites rather than create several site collections. The reason for this is that each new site collection server like a new web application with isolated scope to features, templates and search. You hardly need this. So, start with only one site collections, and try to avoid number of new site collection if you don’t have solid reasons for this.
14. Plan your site collection and sites location among content databases. Don’t end up with one big content database, because you can’t optimize your data usage in this case. Refer to my recent post, where I described why you need to plan your content databases: http://msmvps.com/blogs/laflour/archive/2008/10/14/tips-to-create-a-site-collection-in-new-content-database.aspx
15. Setup SQL mirroring when you have empty content databases. Your DR box usually locates outside your organization with limited connections, and setting mirroring for big content database is very slow process.
16. Save all your command and prefer to script everything you do during installing and configuring SharePoint Farm, because it saves your time when something going wrong and you need to reinstall your box.

Development

1. Use separate SharePoint installation (different from Production) for development, because production boxes should be clean, without all those development tools you are going to use. I  usually use virtualized environment
2. I prefer to have .NET 3.5 and VS 2008  with SQL 2008 + TFS 2008 servers for development environment
3. “Visual Studio WSS Extensions” simplifies your work, but only if you are working on “proof-of-concept”. I prefer not to use it in real development, because there are some bugs, and you can use several alternative tools  http://laflour.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!7575E2FFC19135B4!1047.entry
4. Setup Visual Studio SharePoint solution via the following template, http://blogs.msdn.com/gderun/archive/2008/01/11/sharepoint-visual-studio-project-and-deployment-templates.aspx . It simplify moving you package builds to TFS

 

Post-Installation Tasks

1. Maintain your database to improve performance. Follow this guideline

 

That’s all. I welcome to hear some of yours "best practices", if you have any

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