Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 31. The Infrastructure

To support the designs put forth in this book, we must describe the pieces of infrastructure that are required to support this effort. This chapter discusses the physical and logical infrastructure that support the designs. The areas that we cover are:

• The Environment

  • Web Tier

  • App Tier

  • SQL Tier

  • LightSwitch development system

  • Active Directory

• SharePoint Server 2010 (Enterprise Edition)

• Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011

  • Development environment

  • Application Server components

• SQL Server

  • Analysis Services

  • Reporting Services

  • Database Services

• SQL Server Licensing

As we examine each of the components, we will discuss the infrastructure requirements of each and where they fit into the scenario.

The Environment

In this book, we are using a five-machine development environment. It is important to point out that this environment is designed to simulate a separation of the operational tiers and does not reflect the performance requirements for a production environment.

For the purpose of this book, we have opted to use CloudShare to host our environment. The CloudShare infrastructure allows us to quickly spin up servers and connect them. The environment allows for 16GB of RAM, 500GB of hard drive storage, and 10 vCPUs. The drivers behind using CloudShare were:

• Low price point infrastructure as a service

• Ability to collaborate with multiple parties in a shared environment

• Licensing included with environment pricing

• Prebuilt and preconfigured development machines

• Ability to snapshot single ...