Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

10.7 Preparing for Software Deployment 213

Chapter 10

serious architecture contender. Obviously, another issue with centralized

deployments is that you’re effectively “placing all your eggs in one basket,”

thus placing demands on your business continuity planning. Business conti-

nuity planning should detail the plan to continue operations in the shortest

available time when a disaster strikes and the primary server farm cannot be

quickly brought back online. Data center fires are not unheard of, and other

natural and manmade disasters are also possible. If you must be able to con-

tinue operations in these exceptional circumstances, you must plan for a

disaster recovery environment in another datacenter.

The second option is to deploy regional instances in the user population

centers across the enterprise. While technically this is an easy fix, it does

cause headaches for the knowledge management and information architec-

ture planners. By distributing sites across servers, you are effectively creating

information silos in these regional environments. Operations overhead is also

increased, because there are now more servers to look over. The cost is likely

higher, given the extra hardware and operational requirements, especially if

high availability is still a requirement in these regional instances.

While regionalized deployments will continue to be a valid option, the

recent industry drive for datacenter consolidation is likely to ensure that cen-

tralized deployments will be the flavor for SharePoint 2007. For example, the

internal HP deployment for SharePoint 2003 spanned 6 farms across all

regions in an effort to balance network performance with centralized opera-

tions model. The deployment architecture was largely driven by the network

topology and designed to allow best possible end-user performance in the

company’s network framework. However, with the new drive for data center

consolidation, the architecture was collapsed to a centralized deployment in

SharePoint 2007. Given the new drive, the program was able to dictate the

required network topology that would support SharePoint deployment,

instead of the other way around back in 2003.

10.7 Preparing for Software Deployment

Before installing the products, you should take a moment to review some

upfront tasks that will help streamline the deployment process and save you

time and effort. Because certain infrastructure configuration changes, such as

adding DNS aliases and pointers, can take a while to synchronize across the

organization, it’s good to plan and execute them in advance.

10.7.1 Service Accounts

Service accounts are straightforward domain user identities. However, to

reduce operational overhead, they are often configured with different security

policies than normal user accounts. Typically, service accounts are set to