Windows Server 2003 Migration Planning Assistant - SharePoint Server

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While most SMB exposure to SharePoint is via the included SharePoint Team Services or SharePoint Foundation that was included in Small Business Server, so the complexity of solutions used is generally quite low, normally revolving around team sites and document libraries, rather than the advanced development and workflow capabilities that SharePoint Server traditionally provides. The main options here are to migrate the data to Office 365 and SharePoint Online, or to roll out SharePoint Foundation for those that need these capabilities in house.

Virtualizing SharePoint Server

Increasingly, organizations want to virtualize modern multi-tiered applications like SharePoint to better meet business and productivity needs. This makes it necessary to consolidate and optimize computing resources for improved flexibility, scalability, and manageability of collaboration workloads. In turn, this requirement helps to better scale the key components of such demanding workloads—web servers, application servers, and database servers.

In a traditional SharePoint deployment, dedicated physical servers are often used to deploy individual roles/components, including the front-end web server, application server, and database server. Organizations use separate physical servers for these roles to ensure high availability of services, better scalability, and improved performance. However, using separate physical servers for separate roles has certain limitations, including:

  • Underutilized resources: CPU, memory, and storage are dedicated to a specific workload and remain idle while waiting for instructions, thereby consuming unnecessary power and space.
  • Higher costs: Acquisition, maintenance, and management are more expensive.
  • Reduced efficiency: A longer time is required to recover from outages. Plus, a higher Recovery Time Objective (RTO) may affect the service-level agreement (SLA).

For more information, go to
https://download.microsoft.com/download/0/0/1/001ADCCC-A45B-47E3-8DA4-ED51E3208021/Best_Practices_for_Virtualizing_and_Managing_SharePoint

Upgrade on new hardware

SharePoint has changed substantially since Windows Server 2003/R2. The current version is SharePoint Server 2013 SP1, and Windows SharePoint Services has been discontinued. SharePoint Server 2013 SP1 allows you take advantage of all the advances in SharePoint Server for performance, reliability, manageability, and it has new application models. It runs on Windows Server 2012 R2. TechNet has additional resources and information on the upgrade process to SharePoint Server 2013 (please see https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff730260(v=office.15).aspx as a starting point). You will likely need to purchase new hardware to run SharePoint Server 2013 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

Technologies involved with this solution:

SharePoint Server 2013 SP1
Windows Server 2012 R2
Physical Server

Top Considerations:

Verify future plans for growth, new areas to consider include Social, eDiscovery and Search. Make sure your SharePoint Migration is included in any future Cloud Projects.

SharePoint Online

One of the best options for migrating SharePoint off Windows Server 2003/R2 is Office 365, a cloud-based service designed to meet organizational needs for robust security, reliability, and user productivity. Office 365 will likely provide the fastest and easiest option for your migration. It will reduce your planning costs and may lead to overall cost savings because of savings in hardware capital expenditures and ongoing operations costs. You will need to ensure you have well designed connectivity for your infrastructure if you are running a hybrid cloud and on-premises architecture.

Technologies involved with this solution:

Office 365 with SharePoint online