Introduction to Farm Management

Managing a SharePoint environment has many things in common with managing most other enterprise-grade applications. The goal is to create a system that is reliable, maintainable, and performant. To do this, the system needs to be installed and upgraded in a consistent, documented way. The data and configurations for the system should be backed up regularly with plans in place for restoring those backups locally or in a remote disaster recovery facility. The system should be proactively monitored to ensure that problems are addressed before they impact users. The capacity of the system, for both processing and storage, should be compared to the current usage and tracked over time to allow advanced planning for needed upgrades.

In a SharePoint environment, several additional challenges need to be considered when designing a plan for managing a large installation:

• A SharePoint Server farm consists of many different types of servers that may perform different types of functions. There may be web servers, application servers, indexers, crawlers, search query processors, and multiple database servers.
• Not all executable logic on the system is deployed and controlled by the central farm administrators. Think workflows, sandboxed solutions, InfoPath forms, etc.
• In a multi-tenancy or hosted environment, several organizations may be accessing the same hardware platform.
• Security rules can vary from one part of the farm to another.
• The various subsystems that run within SharePoint each have their own configuration options. Some may even have more than one set of configured services.
• Each component in SharePoint may consume storage and processing resources and log diagnostic events in very different ways.

We will break down the tools for managing a SharePoint farm into three categories: configuring, monitoring, and maintaining. There is often a fine or virtually nonexistent line between these categories, but we will use them for explanation purposes. As in Chapter 6, we will not attempt to present all of the technical details concerning these tools, but, rather, we'll present an overview of the toolset available.

Additional information can be found on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) or TechNet web sites or in any number of specialized technical publications. Also consider downloading the SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit available from Microsoft on TechNet at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc508851.aspx.