Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig?

Over the last year I’ve been working with SharePoint 2010 in various ways. With the new requirements of x64 hardware in this release, I got a lot of questions at the SharePoint Conference, on Twitter and via my blog on what hardware I use to do my SharePoint 2010 development & demos. Here it goes... hopefully this helps someone else out there.

The setup…

First, let’s get on the same page: SharePoint 2010 *requires* a 64-bit operating system in Windows Server 2008. For the majority of us you’ll want to virtualize it. These virtual machines, at least today in beta 2, really want at least 4GB of RAM allocated to them (that’s what I run most of mine at).

Unfortunately Microsoft doesn’t have a desktop virtualization story that supports 64-bit operating systems. The only Microsoft solution is to run Hyper-V which means you have to be running Windows Server 2008 x64 as the host OS. The other option is VMWare Workstation which can do 64-bit guest OS’. There are other virtualization options, but these are the two most common ones.

The back story…

For the first few months of this year I was still on my MacBook Pro that I loved. However when you’re stuck with virtualization, you don’t want to run your VM off the same HDD spindle as your host OS… the I/O fighting between the host OS & the VM kills performance. That means you always have a 2nd HDD spindle. With my MacBook Pro, that meant an external drive (which I hated doing). The other thing was that at the time the MacBook Pro only supported 4GB of RAM. Ugh… annoying!

Get to the point: The portable hardware…

So in May I switched back to a PC. I got a Lenovo ThinkPad w500. I looked at the HP EliteBook 8720* line as well as the Dell Precision M6400. For me, the Dell was MASSIVE… there is a really good reason why you don’t see the power supply in the pictures… because it’s MASSIVE… the box is big too. Sure the Dell has a quad core CPU, but the form factor is just too big. The HP is nice… that’s the demo machine a lot of Microsoft folks use, but I’m just not a fan of HP laptops. Plus, both of those have that extra numeric keypad. Notice the title of this section: the portable hardware… those those two laptops are huge.

For me the Lenovo w500 is perfect… it’s a super powerful & very well built solid machine. If I didn’t have it and had to get another one, I’d get the exact same machine again.

The only special configuration I ordered it with was the Intel T9600 Core2 CPU (2.8Ghz), 2GB RAM, a 128GB SSD as my primary drive and a extra drive caddy that could be swapped out with my modular DVD drive. To save a bit, I got the least amount of memory from Lenovo and then proceeded to upgrade it to 8GB of RAM (two 4GB modules) from Crucial.com. I also ordered a 7200RPM HDD that I put in the caddy… so this is the hardware I ran with at the SharePoint Conference (leaving out anything not important):

Lenovo ThinkPad w500
Intel Core2 T9600 (2.8Ghz)
8GB RAM
128GB SSD
360GB 7200RPM HDD spindle

For my OS configuration, I have two native installed OS’ on the two drives & have my laptop configured for dual boot:

Drive 1 (128 GB SSD) – one partition with Windows 7
Drive 2 (360 GB 7200RPM) – two partitions… one with Windows Server 2008 R2 + Hyper-V & one with all the VMs on it

This setup ran great… even having the Hyper-V OS on the same spindle where the VM’s VHD files were located.

While at the SharePoint Conference I saw a few sessions where folks were using two SSD’s… one for their VMs. There was this one HP laptop with two SSD’s that the ECM track presenters shared that just screamed… it was blazing fast and you’d never guess it was a laptop… you’d think it was some massive blade server in the back. That changed my mind.

When I got home last week from the show I swapped out the 360GB 7200RPM drive for a Crucial 256GB SSD. This guy has 250MB/s read times & 200MB/s write times! So far I’ve been VERY pleased… it is incredibly fast! My new portable configuration is:

Lenovo ThinkPad w500
Intel Core2 T9600 (2.8Ghz)
8GB RAM
128GB SSD (Windows 7)
256GB SSD (Windows 2008 R2 + Hyper-V w/ all VMs)

I do all my SharePoint work on my laptop from Hyper-V when I’m not in my home office like when I’m teaching, presenting or just away from the home office.

The non-portable hardware…

What about the day-to-day SharePoint development business when I’m in my home-office? For that I never use my laptop to run SharePoint. If you are a long time reader, you’ll know I built a virtualization rig just for this purpose. I still do 100% of my SharePoint work on my virtualization rig when I’m at my home office. The virtualization rig is super powerful, has loads of memory and is absolutely silent with passive cooling.

The only time I boot to my Windows 2008 R2 partition and fire up Hyper-V when I’m home is when I’m copying VM’s over or prepping for a class/presentation I’m about to hit the road for.

Closing thoughts…

So that’s how I do my SharePoint 2010 development. Others will have their own opinion (I know many who are very happy with their HP’s an Dell’s)… no one is right/wrong. For me, this configuration works great for me and is the perfect balance between top performance and portability. Now I just need to find a better backpack as my huge Swiss Army bag feels like it weighs 5lbs when empty!

I do get two questions about this setup: why not 16GB of memory and why the SSD’s?

To the question about 16GB, frankly I think that’s overkill. First, it’s not easy finding a PORTABLE laptop that can support 16GB and second, 16GB is WAY too expensive in my eyes as I can always run a SP2010 VM at 4GB… when presenting/teaching I bump it up to 6GB. If you need multiple VMs running for some reason (personally, something I find I never need to do), I still think 8GB is fine.

To the question about SSD’s: I fully recognize that two SSD’s in a laptop isn’t the most cost effective option for many. I didn’t need to go this route (no do you)… two 7200RPM spindles would work (and did work) just fine (just make sure they are 7200RPM spindles and not 5400RPM).

Why the SSD’s? I look at it this way: for most small businesses, you don’t have a ton of capital expenses. From my perspective, if I’m going to be on a laptop 8hrs, when developing for SharePoint, demo’ing and teaching SharePoint is my life, I want a good experience and not have to wait around. If you’re an avid cook, do you use crappy knives or so-so pots? No… you’ve got something much better than what’s in my kitchen like Henckel knives or All Clad cookware.

posted on Tuesday, November 03, 2009 7:05 AM

Feedback

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/3/2009 8:06 AM Wout

Your Macbook Pro story is so recognizable. I'm currently also running to its limitations and I'm also considering switching back to PC. :)

The SSD certainly is an added value when developing in VM environments. For optimal performance and to minimize fragmentation I sometimes completely clean the drive and copy the VM images back.

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/3/2009 8:08 AM Daniel

In one of the keynote demos, he mentioned sp2010 development was supported in win7. I was suprised, but he showed vs and win7 and the audience clapped. I've been unable to find more on that. What's the catch?

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/3/2009 8:22 AM Martin Hatch

The current machine that I use is a Dell XPS M1330.

Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB RAM
7200rpm 320GB HDD

It runs quite well on 2GB for MOSS 2007, but the higher RAM requirements for SP 2010 will probably prompt an upgrade. Hopefully we'll get SSD too! :)

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/3/2009 8:35 AM Jeremy Thake

Thanks for taking the time to explain how "you roll" mate, I'm just shopping around and I've also put together a page on the SharePointDevWiki.com too.

Check it out here:
www.sharepointdevwiki.com/.../Building+a+ShareP...

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/3/2009 9:32 AM bazztrap

Interesting, I have been waiting for Lenovo to release W-500 with corei-7s (do you think it matters? ). Above was the configuration I was about to buy last month but now I am in a waiting mode.

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/3/2009 9:42 AM Tristan Watkins

Hi Andrew,

I'm curious, have you benchmarked performance with 6GB vs 4GB on your rig? I would expect this to introduce memory paging across NUMA nodes, which should degrade performance. I would expect that 4GB would out-perform 6GB. I've seen this when exceeding 2GB RAM on a 4GB rig. More info here: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd277865.aspx

Cheers,

Tristan

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/3/2009 10:02 AM Kanwal Khipple

What kind of SSDs are you using? I've heard amazing things about the Intel SSDs. Either way, I took your advice and should have my development rig very shortly. :)

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/3/2009 1:01 PM Sherman Woo

Great post summarizing the whys of your choices. I'm looking forward to ditching my 2009 MacBook Pro 15" for a lappy with i7 Mobile. The MBP is sexy as all get-out, but I have some quirks with it, mostly related to the nav keys on the keyb, and the poor LCD resolution (which is really only a pain when I'm connected to external screen at diff resolution).

Likely leaning towards the Lenovo T510 in January. Will have to evaluate the SSD options at that time. Battery life and weight must be awesome in your configuration.

Also love your analogy with chefs and knives. Ever watch Top Chef? "You may now pack your knives and go..." Awesome.

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/3/2009 6:11 PM Andy

This is a fantastic article! You've shared some very valuable information for SharePoint users! Keep up the great posts!

You should think about joining the SharePoint conversation on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/office

Cheers,
Andy
MSFT Office Outreach Team

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/3/2009 8:58 PM AC [MVP MOSS]

Daniel-
You can install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 x64... there's even an article explaining it in the beta SDK on MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx

Bazztrap-
Not familiar with the Core i7's... sorry.

Tristan-
Nothing specific... I've tested and know that it's performing better at 6GB. The NUMA issue only applies to select AMD chips, not Intel chips so it's not an issue for me.

Kanwal-
Think the 128GB that Lenovo included that's my primary drive for Windows 7 is Samsung, but the ones I buy are from Crucial as the blog post indicates.

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/4/2009 9:59 AM John

Do you have VS2010 (x86 only) and SPD2010 (x64 or x86?, since it must match SPD2007 to be installed side-by-side) on your 256GB SSD?
Also, Is there a post that maps the SharePoint 2007 product names with their SharePoint 2010 counterparts?

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/4/2009 11:54 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

John - I have Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 installed and SPD 2010 x64 installed on the VM that runs on my 256GB SSD. You don't have to match SPD x86/x64 with the version of SharePoint... wouldn't make much sense to have an x86 version of SPD 2010 if it did considering SharePoint is only x64. I haven't seen anything that maps product names between 2007 & 2010. The only difference I've seen from the two is between what BDC was and what BCS is.

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/4/2009 12:07 PM Ravikanth

Nice article. Though I am not a developer, I experiment quite a bit on SharePoint at home. I have a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 implementation and I run various VMs for my SharePoint farm setup. I have written about my home setup at http://www.ravichaganti.com/blog/?p=818

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/4/2009 5:22 PM Steph Zielenski

Awesome post, thanks for all the great info (we're all here in the office drooling over your SSDs!).

Re Win7, do you have a good sense of how we should decide whether to have Devs use Win7 or 2008? You seem to use 2008, what went into that decision? The MSDN article talks about HOW to install it, but I didn't see any info on what might be different, or what limitations a Win7 install might have (i.e., limited number of web apps, etc).

Any insight would be much appreciated!

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/4/2009 5:39 PM AC [MVP MOSS]

Steph- Sorry... don't know off hand. Personally I don't get the Win7 install option and won't use it. Doesn't make sense to do server development on a client OS when you have to test on the server anyway IMHO.

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/4/2009 7:37 PM Tristan Watkins

Hi again Andrew,

Thanks for replying. I misunderstood that all multi-core systems implemented NUMA architectures. I would guess my performance loss at >2GB RAM for guests on a 4GB RAM system was probably down to insufficient host resources.

Do you have any more information about it only applying to AMD chips? I've been looking at this in more details and I can see that some Intel chips also have NUMA architectures. I believe the new Nehalem (i7) chips do, and they also support SLAT (improving Hyper-V graphics performance).

Cheers,

Tristan

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/5/2009 8:06 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

Tristan-
You need to talk to someone else about this... I can't speak intelligently about it.

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/5/2009 3:24 PM Johan

I would have gone with the Dell. So what if it is a little bigger not a big difference to me. I like the extra power it gives you. Hardware is cheap compare to the extra productivity you get from it. Yes it is also more expensive, but you would make up the difference pretty quick in productivity.

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/5/2009 3:38 PM AC [MVP MOSS]

Johan- Maybe I should have clarified that I'm a road warrior so smaller form factor and weight is a big factor for me.

# re: Doing SharePoint 2010 Development – What’s in your rig? 11/7/2009 6:02 PM Amrish Tandon

I am running a Dell XPS M1530.

Intel Core 2 Duo
8GB RAM
7200rpm 320GB HDD

I am using Hyper V to test out VS 2010 beta and will be installing SharePOint 2010 bets on the VM too.

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