SharePoint Buzz

For everyone who attended SharePoint Conference 2009 or kept an eye on twitter, know that Microsoft announced that the SharePoint 2010 Beta will be available in November 2009.  In order to prepare for that, Microsoft has done a great job to provide us with plenty of SharePoint 2010 information before the Beta is even released!

I purchased new hardware in the hopes of hosting multiple virtual machines and hope that this setup works flawlessly. If any of you have advice, please feel free to contribute with your comments.  In preparation for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, my development rig had to meet at least the following:

• 64-bit Processor
• 4 GB RAM for a single server

These were my basic requirements and then I started looking at what the requirements were for SharePoint 2010.  The minimum requirements for SharePoint 2010:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 64-bit operating system with Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 64-bit with SP2 or SQL Server 2008 64-bit
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 with SP1 installed

I also wanted the ability to be able to fire up multiple virtual machines to mimic my clients farm configuration as closely as possible.  Hardware is ever changing and I wanted a reasonably powerful machine but I still had to have a budget for building this machine: $4000.

After reading Andrew Connell, Andrew Woodward (21apps), Reza Alireza and Eli Robillard’s posts on what they were using to host similar configurations, I went with the an Intel Xeon based server machine with 12 GB of memory and a RAID10 configuration.  This machine was massive to say the least!   It runs fairly fast and is super quiet! 

My SharePoint 2010 Development Rig specifications are as follows:

• Case               
  • ANTEC TITAN 650 SERVER CASE
• Power Supply   
  • Corsair 850W
• Motherboard    
  • Asus Z8NA-D6C
• 2 CPUs               
  • Xeon E5520 (2.26ghz / 8MB/ Quad Core with HT)
• 2 Heat sinks       
  • Xeon STS100C Heat sinks
• 2 RAM kits
  • OCZ 6GB DDR3 kits
• Video             
  • NVIDIA 7200GS 512MB
  Main Hard Drive      
  • Intel X25-M 80GB SSD
• Hard Drive      
  • 4xSeagate 500GB in RAID10
• DVD-Writer    
  • LG 22x

UPDATE:  No rig post is complete without a couple of pictures.

In my upcoming posts, I will configure SharePoint 2010 environment.  If you have any questions, please post them in the comments below.

Additional Resources:

1. Microsoft’s recommended hardware requirements for SharePoint Server 2010
2. A nice upgrade to my virtualization rig – look ma… no fans!
3. How to Build a SharePoint 2010 Development Machine (Part I)
4. My Dev Rig – The story so far