Ladies and Gentlemen:
Microsoft has officially made SharePoint 2016’s first public beta available for
us to play with. As expected, on the last month August 2015, we can now install
SharePoint 2016 to see what this first preview is made of. I’ve had the chance
to play for a few days, here's everything you need to know.
System Requirements
Scenario
|
Deployment type and scale
|
Processor
|
RAM
|
Hard disk
|
Database server running a single SQL instance
|
Development or evaluation installation with the minimum recommended
services
|
64-bit, 4 cores
|
12-16 GB
|
80 GB for system drive
100 GB for second drive
|
Database server running a single SQL instance
|
Pilot, user acceptance test running all available services
|
64-bit, 4 cores
|
16-24 GB
|
80 GB for system drive
100 GB for second drive and additional drives
|
Web server or application server in a three-tier farm
|
Development or evaluation installation with the minimum number of
services
|
64-bit, 4 cores
|
8-12 GB
|
80 GB for system drive
80 GB for second drive
|
Web server or application server in a three-tier farm
|
Pilot, user acceptance test running all available services
|
64-bit, 4 cores
|
12-16 GB
|
80 GB for system drive
80 GB for second drive and additional drives
|
Upgrade and Migration
SharePoint Server 2016 will
support upgrade from SharePoint Server 2013. To upgrade from SharePoint
Server 2013 to SharePoint Server 2016, you can use the database-attach method
to upgrade. In the database-attach method, you first create and configure a
SharePoint Server 2016 farm. Then you copy the content and service application
databases from the SharePoint Server 2013 farm, and then attach and upgrade the
databases. This upgrades the data to the new version.
NOTE Site collections provisioned in backward
compatible SharePoint 2010 (14) mode, must be upgraded to 2013 prior to
upgrading to SharePoint Server 2016. For additional information on
upgrading site collections to SharePoint 2013
MinRole Overview
One of the early new
infrastructure advancements in SharePoint Server 2016 is a new concept,
MinRole. MinRole is designed to transform guidance into code, simplifying
deployment and scale with SharePoint ensuring a request is served end-to-end by
the receiving server based on the origination of the request (I.e. end user or
batch processing) and role of the destination server.
In previous versions of
SharePoint, installation is role agnostic, which being a SharePoint servers’
role was only defined by what services were provisioned and its placement in a
SharePoint Farm topology. In many cases to serve a request, whether end
user initiated or otherwise, the request traversed the scope of the SharePoint
topology.
MinRole provides an
out-of-the-box experience that provides topology recommendations, simplifies
on-premises server farm deployments, and reduces the unit of scale to simplify
capacity planning while providing predictable performance characteristics through
enabling selective provisioning of SharePoint server roles based on position
and function within a topology.
Role Name
|
Description
|
Special Load
|
Reserved for
services to be isolated from other services, I.e. 3rd party,
PerformancePoint, etc.
|
Web Front End
|
Services end user
requests, optimized for low latency.
|
Single Server
Farm
|
Provisions all
services on the server for a single server deployment. This role is
provided for evaluation and development purposes.
|
Search
|
Reserved for
Search services.
|
Application
|
Services the
backend jobs or the requests triggered by backend jobs, optimized for high
throughput.
|
Distributed Cache
|
Services
distributed cache for the farm. Optionally, the server assigned to this role
can load balance end user requests among the web front ends.
|
MinRole enables an administrator to select the
appropriate server role for a specific server.
provisioning SharePoint Server 2016 based on five
(5) predefined configurations:A predefined server role is configured and
optimized for its intended purpose provisioning the expected services designed
to support its function within a server farm environment.In SharePoint Server
2016 MinRole can be instrumented through the PSConfig GUI or command line.
Single Server Farm
Single Server farm is still an option for
SharePoint 2016, but you don't get SQL Server Express included in the
installation. If you want to create a single server farm, you'll need to
install SQL Server independently of the SharePoint installation.
Patching
The patching
process for current versions of SharePoint as being cumbersome and complex.
"In the past with SharePoint, for general updates you got about 37
individual files to process for each patch, plus 10 for each language pack
installed. In SharePoint 2016, you get 2 files to process, plus 1 file per
language pack." The biggest improvement in patching for SharePoint 2016 is
In-place, online, installation of patches. You can install the patches in the
middle of the day without affecting users accessing the farm at all. "You
no longer have to maintain a highly redundant farm just to facilitate the
patching process,"
Boundaries And Limits
SharePoint 2016 is getting a serious upgrade in the
sheer amount of data that it can handle. The maximum content database size,
while not yet finalized, is expected to be in the 1 TB range, up from the
current maximum of 200 GB. Content databases will be able to hold approximately
100,000 site collections.Lists and libraries get an upgrade, too. The maximum
size of items in a view will be raised from 2,000 to 5,000. Libraries will be
able to hold large documents, with the maximum file size being raised from 2 GB
to 10 GB.Search Indexed also doubles the scale, with searchable items growing
to a maximum of 500 million items.
Fast Site Creation
One of the things
that takes the longest during site collection creation is the provisioning of
all of the site features. This is something that doesn't happen if you simply
clone an existing site collection, because all of the provisioning has already
taken place.In SharePoint 2106, the site collection process will rely much more
on the cloning of existing site collections, which increases the speed that
they can be deployed and also extends more options for setting default site
collection templates and master copies.
Durable Links
Durable Links provide a
resource Id based link for Web Application Open Platform Interface Protocol
(WOPI) documents served by SharePoint and Office Online Server. The resource Id
assigned to individual documents is stored in the content database related to
the source document. When using Durable Links when a user selects a link to a
specific document, SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview looks up the file by the
resource Id and opens it in Office Online Server Preview. Durable Links
allow documents to be moved and renamed without affecting the integrity of the
linking Url associated with a document.
Example (Renaming a Document)
In the illustration below a
document exists with the Title property polasoft .docx with the absolute Url: https://<server>/Shared%20Documents/polasoft.docx?d=w6143f2e64f201322eacd269bb84649ae.
In the illustration below
the source document polasoft .(Final).docx with the absoluteUrl:https://<server>/Shared%20Documents/polasoft(Final).docx?d=w6143f2e64f201322eacd269bb84649ae.
In either scenario the link
will return the original document based on the resource Id assigned to the
document (w6143f2e64f201322eacd269bb84649ae).
Search Scale and Resiliency Improvements
Improvements in performance
and scale in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview search now allow search to scale
up to 500 million items, an increase of 250 million items SharePoint Server
2013 based on 10 million items per index partition. In SharePoint Server
2013 and SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview each index partition contains a
subset of the whole search index. If the number of indexed items is high in
relation to how much memory the server has, affects the query response time
negatively. SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview has been improved to
support 20 million items per index partition, where 500 million items are based
on 25x index partitions.
In addition to improving the
search scale boundaries as described above, SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview
makes a number of general performance optimizations in the query path to reduce
overall latency, implements changes in merge scheduling reducing peak disk and
memory usage from ~210% steady state consumption to ~140% enabling larger index
partitions while avoiding a large resource buffer.
While improvements in scale
and performance allow substantially larger index partitions, as the number of
partitions increase, so does the need for resiliency. SharePoint Server
2016 IT Preview implements new failover logic for serving queries between index
replicas which improves the ability to respond to overload to include immediate
recovery when the overload is removed.
SharePoint 2016 is still
about a year away, but we'll start seeing preview releases
Hope this helps some one
Hope this helps some one
