Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 32. Your Environment

As SharePoint becomes more of a centerpiece in the Microsoft BI landscape, a major consideration that must be examined is the hardware and software required to operate a properly performing and secure environment.

Historically, a BI environment would require a large number of big iron servers with massive amounts of expensive storage behind it. With the new features of SQL Server 2012 and the xVelocity engine, the landscape has changed in a dramatic way.

In this chapter, we discuss the way in which you will need to lay out your environment to support the efforts in this book and a BI scenario in general. As a part of this effort, we will provide guidance around creating the environment in which to develop the solutions in this book, as well as recommended practices for development and production environments.

The topics covered are:

• Server requirements

  • Physical versus virtual

  • Overall constants

  • SharePoint and SQL Server specifics

• Single server versus multi-server environments

  • Logical requirements

  • Server role determination

  • Recommended technical specifications

Note that we are not going to be making recommendations around best practices, but instead will suggest recommended practices. The reason for this distinction is that Microsoft does change its best practices periodically and we are making recommendations based upon our years of experience doing work with BI scenarios.

Server Requirements

When examining physical servers versus virtualized servers, general constants ...