From students one of my most asked questions about MOSS is….”Will it handle an upgrade?”…something
along the lines of ..”…you know we have a medium installation of 183 distributed
V2 sites with central portals, index propagation and search.”
So I thought I’d outline some of my initial upgrade experiences from MOSS RTM.
(On this install – used by a small-medium sized company, they were up for technology
so we had SPS2003+SP2…->MOSS Beta2 installed for a while. The RTM install wouldnt
kick off until I removed Beta2)
After the product key in the setup I got these upgrade screens….(once the product
is installed we can always run the psconfig.exe to start the ‘wizard’)
I’m doing all at once here – as this company is pretty standard in that fashion. Customisation
here weigh in at about 10% of the overall Sharepoint site functionality.
Here’s the screen for the File Locations – I moved these out to D-Drive (separate
disk) and all the Indexing will be hit pretty hard.
Rule of thumb is to allow 200% space increase for the indexed content. So if you’re
indexing 100MB, then 200MB free for indexing is recommended.
Actually the search/index process in MOSS is pretty well defined and taking its roots
from ‘Indexing Service’ many many moons ago. The indexes (known as Catalogs – you
can access these through the APIs etc) are stored in a highly optimised format. Compressed!
And the process of ‘indexing’ content can be ‘tweaked’ through things like ‘the number
of Word lists’ in memory, Shadow Indexing and finally the master Index.
Some one was smiling….:)
So at this point I have all the binaries installed and all the appropriate files registered.
The Wizard will go and (hopefully) create the first Admin Site, which from there I
can provision the actual Content based sites and the Shared Services (search, excel,
mysite etc)
(damn…got hit with a ‘we need to reboot to continue…’ – so rebooting now.)