A lot of people asking me about what sort of hardware specification for my SharePoint environment when I am doing testing or development, or what sort of hardware they need when develop SharePoint project in laptop and etc.
In past, I had done number of projects which involved of multi-servers farm configuration, such as Fast Search for SharePoint, SharePoint staging to production deployment or multiple SharePoint web front-end server. Therefore I needs a decent machine at least can run multiple VMs and the same time without too much compromised on portability and performance.
I had done my research on Internet and found out there are not many laptops meet my criteria (year 2010) but with big bucks. Hereafter, I bought a Sony F series laptop with external Solid State (SSD) hard-disk and end result is brilliant!!! I was running three VMs at the same time without any lagging or unresponsive click, the environment consisted of Windows Server 2008R2, Active Directory, SQL 2008R2, SharePoint 2010 Ent, Fast Search for SharePoint and Visual Studio 2010.
Here the details those servers running on laptop:
Server 1 – External SSD
Windows Server 2008R2
Active Directory
384 Memory
Server 2 – External SSD
Windows Server 2008R2
MS SQL 2008R2
Fast Search for SharePoint
3GB memory
Server 3 – Internal HD
Windows Server 2008R2
SharePoint 2010 Enterprise
Visual Studio 2010
3GB memory
As you can see on above configuration it is resource intensive environment on laptop, but everything is running smoothly although I only allocated 3GB memory for Fast and SharePoint and 384MB for AD.
And let me explain why server will running slow when running multiple servers on laptop or desktop,
- High CPU usage with long queuing time, system is received a lot of request from users/other servers but cannot complete them on time.
- Server’s memory is running low and the system is swapping page files on hard disk, at the same time other applications are access files on hard disk. It causing hard disk has very high activity and take long time read/write file.
Nowadays, most desktop/laptop equipped with very decent cpu, such as Intel i3, i5, i7 or AMD qual/six cores therefore issue number one should not causing too much problem. But issue number two which low on memory for most laptop or desktop, laptop beyond 8GB will be expensive and desktop’s memory is cheaper but not so portable compare to desktop if you development to be mobile. Even you have plenty of memory but running all server on same mechanical hard disk also will causing some I/O bottleneck due to low Input/Output Per Second (IOPS).
The issue can be addressed easily with separate SSD hard disk, this also cheaper compare to get super-duper machine. This is because the SSD gives better performance compare to normal hard disk, like transfer speed and random access time. The OCz Vertex 2 SSD featured with Read=285MB, write=275MB and 50,000 IOPS. The servers allocated with low memory but if it installed on SSD it will not affected that much even high on swapping page files and disk activities. The SSD works similar to memory as low on access time (less waiting time) and high transfer rate. In order to fully utilise performance of the SSD hard disk the ESATA, FireWire or USB3.0 is recommended, anything slower than those will not see significant improvement over SSD.
I had attached my laptop specification for your reference, all these cost less than GBP 1,700 (year 2010)
The laptop specification:
Sony F-Series with 16.4 inches screen.
Windows 7 64 bits
Vmware Workstation
Intel i7 CPU 740 with Qual Cores
8GB of memory
500GB internal hard disk with 7200rpm
Geforce GT 330M 1024 MB graphic card
ESATA OCZ 2.5 Vertex 2 SSD hard disk
