MOSS 2007 upgrade to SharePoint 2010

Requirements, requirements & REQUIREMENTS - gathering, understanding, refinement, gathering, understanding, refinement, gathering ....


We need to understand the business and customers'/users' requirements first.  The requirements can be broken into existing SharePoint 2007 usage scenarios and new usage scenarios. Since SharePoint 2010 enables lots of cool new features, we should educate our users on the new features and understand which ones appeals to them.

Once we understand the requirements, we can then map them into the services that is needed to fulfill those requirements. It is good to have some knowledge on the those services especially in terms of hardware requirements to run them properly. We need to truly understand what services are needed and how intensive they will be used. If what we have collected from users cannot answer these two important questions, then we need to go back to users. This is a very important activity as it will help us to get the right hardware to build our SharePoint 2010 environment.

SharePoint 2010 Services & its Hardware Requirements

When planning to setup SharePoint 2010 environment, we need to understand what are the services that will be required and how heavy each of them will be used. This will help us them to understand the hardware requirement and design the right size of hardware for our SharePoint 2010 environment to ensure optimum performance.


Below are some of the services that is either processing, memory, storage size or  storage speed (IOPS) intensive and any combination of them We need to be extra careful during planning if these services is needed and will be heavily used in our organization. This analysis is based on technet article on capacity management.

1. SharePoint Search Service. This is the king of all services in terms of resource (processor, memory, storage space & speed) utilization across all the 3 tiers - web, application & sql servers. I guess because on this nature, MS recommends that for large farms, we use separate search service farm to host search applications. Note that search service is one of the cross farm service enabled services.

2. User Profile Service and PowerPivot Service. Both services requires lots of resoures in the application and sql servers.

3. Office related services such as PowerPoint, Excel Calculation, Visio, Access, Word Conversion and InfoPath Form services utilizes high application server CPU & RAM.

4. Database operation intensive services such as Logging, Web Analytics and Project service applications requires high end SQL Servers. In most cases, this requires separate SQL Servers to cater for these services applications.