Setting up a mobile SharePoint lab compact enough to fit in a DVD

Saturday 10 January 2009 - Filed under Tech Notes

It’s now January 2009, and a statement like:

The price of crude oil hits an all-time high of US$140 a barrel before it falls dramatically down to around US$40 by the end of the year.

…would have been a hell of a new year prediction for this time last year. I am neither qualified nor willing to make 2009 predictions under that category, but I do have a couple of new additions to my daring technology predictions for 2009:

• The usually-volatile prices of memory (as in chips that go inside computers) fall even further and stay down for the rest of this year.
• Hard disk storage becomes so cheap and plentiful, every 6-year-old in the developed world learns just how big a “terabyte” is. (It’s 1,000 or 1,024 gigabytes, depending on whom you ask.)

They are of course easy guesses and definitely amount to good news to consumers. But fresh headlines like “DRAM chicken game yields no winners” and “Intel cuts Q4 revenue forecast again” indicate that the industry as a whole will suffer in 2009 as demand falls. As if humongous job cuts and frozen demand are not big enough a blow, the IT industry of 2009 is waking up to Enron-like accounting fraud that concerns at least 185 of the Fortune 500 companies, but that’s another topic altogether.

The reason I’m mentioning memory and storage prices is because it’s time to get loaded with memory and storage (before prices bounce back up in this turbulent economy). And yes, this post gets rather technical beyond this point so look away if you have no vested interest in the delivery of IT solutions and services.

Again, the reason I’m mentioning memory and storage prices is because as tough as it may sound, now is the time to invest in computing resources whether you are an enterprise organisation, a boutique shop, or an independent contractor. And here comes the keyword of the day: virtualisation. With the immediate availability of free and affordable virtualisation platforms plus cheap memory and abundant storage, there is just no excuse not to have a go at building the infrastructure or lab environment you always wanted to play with. Gone are the days when you weren’t able to commit to R&D or explore a new area of business just because you couldn’t afford or jump through the hoops of procuring expensive dedicated hardware.

Just do it. Build your own lab and take it with you.
If you work in software services or a related field, there are different levels of virtualisation that can be implemented and the best thing your workplace can do is to take a plunge into a virtualised infrastructure with a datacentre-grade product. But if you don’t see that happening in the near future, or if you like having your own playground/garage/classroom anyway, you can just go ahead and build your own server-client lab and roll it out on your own laptop. Here’s what you need to get started:

• A laptop (not a netbook) that runs Windows XP, Vista, or Mac OS X Leopard and has 4GB of memory; 4GB is the maximum you can have with 32-bit Windows while the new MacBook’s and MacBook Pro’s are known to be capable of having 6 to 8GB. That said, going above 4GB is not necessarily cheap, which makes 4GB the current sweet spot. Update (14 January 2009): Dell has begun selling laptops that come with up to 8GB of RAM standard and 64-bit operating systems at not-so-exorbitant prices. The 4GB barrier is finally being overcome in the consumer market.
• A portable external hard drive, preferably 250GB or bigger in capacity; just go to your local electronics store and get the roomiest portable drive you can find.
• Access to operating systems and other software that you can legitimately use for development and testing purposes.
• A choice of desktop virtualisation software such as VMware Workstation, VMware Server, VMware Fusion for Mac, Parallels Desktop for Mac, and Sun xVM VirtualBox. Prices range from free to around US$189 per copy. My preference is VMware Workstation (or VMware Fusion when working on a Mac).

I’m not going to go into the details of how to build a virtual machine (VM), but only state what can be achieved with my example. I need to design and develop implementations of Office SharePoint Server 2007. With a Windows XP laptop that has 4GB of memory and VMware Workstation, I can set up a SharePoint farm with two servers as follows:

• Server #1 acting as a domain controller and a database server
• Server #2 hosting SharePoint Web applications, i.e. application server plus Web front-end

Give each server about 1GB of memory and I’m good to go. Software and hardware configurations of virtual machines can vary depending on my specific requirements. For example, both servers can set up as Web front-ends if I want to be able to test front-end load balancing.

Once the servers are ready, I can run development tools such as SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio from my physical (host) machine which can talk to my virtual (guest) servers. Alternatively, I can create a third virtual machine and install Windows XP and the development tools on it, in which case I can keep my physical machine functionally separate from my development environment. There it is – a fully-functioning SharePoint lab that can simulate the capabilities of a multi-tier farm built on an Active Directory domain.

The beauty of setting up a lab like this is that you can take the virtual machines with you and plug them into just about any physical computer powerful enough to run them concurrently. What’s more, I can easily burn the compressed images of my virtual machines onto a DVD – or a USB flash drive for that matter. I have archived the different stages of a server installation so I can always make a fresh start wherever I want with minimal administrative work. In my case, each archived image weighs:

• Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 with all available Microsoft Updates but no other software installed, i.e. “clean slate” = 1.23GB
• Above + Active Directory = 1.25GB
• Above + SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition = 1.76GB
• Above + Office SharePoint Server 2007 with December 2008 Cumulative Updates = 2.60GB

I’d like a VM with skim milk, please.
A self-contained SharePoint Server virtual machine that occupies just 2.6GB when compressed? Pretty lightweight and portable, I’d say. Keeping virtual machines in best shape of course requires certain maintenance tasks and best practices, and that’s what I really wanted to have documented. But this whole post is getting too long, so I’m going to put together those caveats and best practices as separate posts.

Just to be clear, I am not at all suggesting that virtual machines built for a laptop-driven lab environment be used for production purposes. They are, however, a perfect cost-saving tool for the envisioning, planning, development, demonstration, training, and functionality testing of solutions and services.

2009-01-10  »  JK