Part 1: Everything you want to know about SharePoint 2016

SharePoint 2016 –The new kid in town. Well I hope you won’t mind when I say that SharePoint 2016 is the new kid in town considering the fact that it has been more than a year since Microsoft has released SharePoint Server 2016 and it has also announced the release of SharePoint Server 2019 a month back at Ignite Conference. However, there’s reason for me to still call SharePoint 2016 as the new kid in town because it still remains to be a cutting-edge platform for many SharePoint professionals out there and I’ve seen many organizations actively working on adapting SharePoint Server 2016 as the modern collaboration platform for their IT workspace.

So, in this article I’m going to help you with some good amount of information that should help you in planning the SharePoint Server 2016 Implementation in your organization. Alright, let’s get started ….

So, these are the topics I’ll be discussing in detail in this article …

Evolution of SharePoint
Software & Hardware requirements for Implementing SharePoint Server 2016.
Pre-requisites for SharePoint server 2016.
Supported browsers for SharePoint 2016.
Boundaries and Limits in SharePoint 2016.
Focus areas of SharePoint Server 2016
What’s new and what’s been deprecated in SharePoint Server 2016?
Migration approach to SharePoint 2016
Deployment guidelines & best practices for implementing SharePoint 2016
Feature Packs
MinRole in SharePoint 2016
Converged codebase in SharePoint 2016
Zero downtime patching in SharePoint 2016
Hybrid Features in SharePoint 2016
SQL Server Best Practices for SharePoint 2016

Evolution of SharePoint:

The above-mentioned image should give you a detailed overview about the evolution of SharePoint. I personally remember starting my career with SharePoint 2010 6 years back and at that point of time I’ve seen many experienced SharePoint folks really getting excited about the rich and cool UI of SharePoint 2010 and its rich capabilities. It has indeed come a long way since then and has grown very rapidly compared to its competitors and still remains to be the most preferred solution for Enterprise Content Management. As SharePoint grew, the range of problems businesses could solve with SharePoint grew wider, and changes in technology and business models brought customers new problems as well as new opportunities. Microsoft kept investing in SharePoint, creating a well-rounded collaboration platform that meets the needs of businesses and – most importantly – has the ability to grow and adapt when new challenges are presented. So, with that being said, let’s dive bit deeper and see what the latest version of SharePoint on-premises (i.e. SharePoint 2016) has for us and how it can help to enhance our business.

2. Software & Hardware requirements for Implementing SharePoint Server 2016:

Every time Microsoft introduces the next version of any product the software and hardware requirements for implementing that product keeps changing and that remains true for SharePoint 2016 as well. So, what should I have in terms of software and hardware for implementing SharePoint Server 2016? The details are as follows ….

Software Requirements for SharePoint 2016:

3. Pre-requisites for SharePoint 2016:

SharePoint 2016, the prerequisites are almost essentially the same as they were for SharePoint 2013, with one or two differences (e.g. .Net Framework 4.5.2). The following is a list of all the SharePoint 2016 Prerequisites components you need to download if you are doing an offline installation.

Note: If your machine is connected to the internet, the prerequisite installer module of the SharePoint 2016 media will automatically take care of downloading and installation of prerequisites, so you don’t need to manually download them all.

4. Supported browsers for SharePoint 2016:

5. Boundaries and Limits in SharePoint 2016:

6. Hardware Requirements for SharePoint 2016:

7. Hardware Requirements for Min Role Architecture:

Note: I’ll be explaining in detail about the Min Role Architecture later in this article

8. Focus areas of SharePoint Server 2016:

Being a cloud-born on-premises platform, SharePoint 2016 focuses on the above-mentioned areas …

Improved User Experiences:
Cloud-Inspired Infrastructure
Compliance and Reporting

a) Improved User Experiences:

Making decisions faster and keeping in contact are the most critical responsibilities for increasing effectiveness in any organization. Users’ ability to access information while on the go is now a workplace necessity. SharePoint Server 2016 will provide improved mobile access to content, people and applications along with touch-based experiences across devices and screen sizes. It will make file storage and document collaboration more people-centric. And it will also enable improved user experiences and capabilities derived from innovations in Office 365, available either as part of your on-premises deployment or through a hybrid implementation of SharePoint Server 2016 and Office 365. As a result of this, users will be able to quickly discover contextually relevant information and data that is stored across both on-premises and cloud environments powered by Office Graph and Delve.

b) Cloud-Inspired Infrastructure:

SharePoint 2016 is the first on-premises server release representative of our experience running SharePoint at scale in Office 365, bringing Microsoft’s own internal investments to the customer’s datacenter that improve performance, reliability and scale as well as enabling true hybrid scenarios that can enrich the customer’s existing on-premises investments.

In addition, with an improved, simplified user experience and integration with products such as the next release of Windows Server, the next generation of SQL Server, and Exchange Server 2016, SharePoint Server 2016 will simplify end-user training and support for IT.

c) Compliance and Reporting:

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is non-negotiable, and overexposure to information can have legal and compliance implications. SharePoint Server 2016 will provide a broad array of features and capabilities designed to make certain that sensitive information remains protected with investments in DLP, new scenarios to enable data encryption, and compliance tools that span on-premises servers and Office 365 while providing a balance between enabling user self-service and ensuring content usage adheres to corporate and security policies .This ensure that the privilege you have doesn’t become intrusive to security and compliance .

9.What’s new in SharePoint Server 2016?

Microsoft never fails to excite its customers by releasing many new features in the new release of every product it develops and SharePoint 2016 is no bar for that. The below mentioned image gives a complete overview of all the new features that has been released in SharePoint 2016.

Note: When I say new features, they might be newly introduced with this release of SharePoint or might be the enhanced version of a feature/service application in the previous release.

As you can see in the image above, SharePoint 2016 comes with almost close to 28 new features.

10.What has been deprecated in SharePoint 2016?

Of course, Microsoft removes few features too which was available in the previous versions of SharePoint and the reason for this is because Microsoft keeps listening to its customers through many user voice channels and based on the feedback given by its customers it either deprecates certain features or tries to enhance a specific feature and releases it once again as a new feature in the next new release or through service packs /CU’s etc.

So, listed below are the features that has been deprecated in SharePoint 2016,

11.Migration Approach to SharePoint 2016:

The below mentioned image depicts the Migration approach to SharePoint 2016.

So, the good news is if you’re running SharePoint 2013 you can directly migrate to SharePoint 2016 and the bad news is you can’t directly migrate to SharePoint 2016 if you’re running SharePoint 2010 version in your environment. However, please note that using third party tools like Share Gate and Metalogix you can migrate from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 and even from any legacy version to SharePoint 2016.

Note: To upgrade from SharePoint Server 2013 to 2016, minimal build SharePoint Server 2013 SP1 + March 2013 PU, build number (15.0.4481.1005)

Steps to plan the migration:

Version to Version upgrade
All Site Collections must be in 15 modes
Database attach upgrade (content only)
Create new SharePoint 2016 farm and attach SharePoint 2013 databases to SharePoint 2016
SharePoint Server 2016 does not support SharePoint 2010 mode (i.e., compatibility level 14) site collections.
SharePoint Server 2016 supports an upgrade from SharePoint Server 2013 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) with March 2013 PU, version 15.0.4481.1005 or higher

The below mentioned image should depict the overall upgrade process:

12. Feature Packs in SharePoint 2016:

With SharePoint 2016 the big new is Microsoft won’t be releasing Service Packs anymore, Feature packs would be taking over Service packs from SharePoint 2016 onwards. However, the release cycle for Feature packs differs from Service packs and let’s talk in detail about that.

The below mentioned image should give you a complete overview of the patching cycle for SharePoint 2016.

So, this is what the image says, Microsoft shipped SharePoint 2016 from March 2016 onwards and as per their normal patching cycle every month they would be releasing a Public update (i.e. Cumulative update) and what happens in this process is, in a specific month’s CU Microsoft would roll out all the new features/fixes etc. and that would be called as a Feature Pack. So, unlike the previous version of SharePoint where Microsoft releases all the new features/services in the form of Service Packs such as SP1 & SP2, for SharePoint 2016 it would be Feature Packs. However, the catch here is that, Microsoft won’t be releasing a specific package once in a year as Service packs instead all the new updates/features would be rolled out in a specific month’s CU and that will be called as a Feature Pack

As of now, Microsoft has released two Feature packs (i.e. Feature Pack 1 & Feature Pack 2). So, before we jump in and talk a look at what’s available in these Feature Packs, let’s try to understand what a Feature Pack is all about.

So, what’s a Feature Pack in SharePoint 2016?

Unlike previous versions of SharePoint, release-to-manufacture (RTM) did not define the end of innovation, but the beginning. As Microsoft continued to develop SharePoint Server 2016, they’ve paid close attention to customer feedback, trends in content management, team collaboration, user experiences across devices, and how the cloud can be blended into existing on-premises scenarios in new and compelling ways. Feature Packs allow us to accelerate delivery of cloud-first features to our Software Assurance customers of SharePoint Server 2016 outside of the traditional 2- to 3-year release cadence.

So, to make this simpler to understand, Feature Pack is an innovative step taken by Microsoft to add new features to SharePoint Product line which were not really announced as part of the initial Product release. Earlier a new feature made its way to SharePoint only as part of Product Launch which happened in three years interval. SharePoint Team will now be taking feedbacks and new features will be deployed as feature packs to SharePoint Server at regular intervals. This will keep SharePoint Server updated with new Cloud features introduced in SharePoint Online

Alright, so this covers Part 1 of “Everything you want to know about SharePoint 2016 “. Will see you all soon in part 2 of this article. Stay tuned!!!

Happy SharePointing!!!…Thanks for reading this post and good luck with your SharePoint 2016 implementation

Demystifying MinRole in SharePoint Server 2016:

MinRole – I hope everyone would agree with me when I say that “MinRole” has become a buzz word among many SharePoint folks ever since Microsoft released SharePoint Server 2016. I myself have personally read many articles/blogs and viewed some videos on it to understand in detail about MinRole and how to make use of it. However, there has been times where I couldn’t really understand it completely and I had to work with many SharePoint experts in the industry to understand in detail about what MinRole is and how it works. But still I can sense a lot of uncertainty among few SharePoint folks in understanding MinRole and how to make use of it. Hence, in this article I’ll be explaining in detail about the below mentioned points….

What is MinRole?
How to deploy a SharePoint 2016 farm using MinRole topology?
Different server roles in MinRole
Different type of MinRole topologies
MinRole -Before and after Feature Pack 1
The benefits of using MinRole
MinRole Administration
MinRole compliancy
Opting out of MinRole
How/where to deploy 3^rd party apps while using MinRole?

Alright, so let’s get started …

What is MinRole?

To put it in very simple words, MinRole is a new farm topology based on a set of predefined server roles which got introduced in SharePoint Server 2016. Unlike the old traditional SharePoint farm topologies where you add a server to a farm and then configure it, here you can select the role of a server when you create a new farm or join a server to an existing farm and SharePoint will automatically configure the services on each server based on the server’s role. SharePoint Server 2016 by default has been optimized for the MinRole farm topology.

So, the point here to understand is, with MinRole you don’t need to add servers to a SharePoint farm and then configure each server in the farm as WFE, APP, Search etc.… MinRole will do that magic for you. Once you add a new SharePoint 2016 server to a farm and run the configuration wizard you would get a screen as shown below which asks you to choose the appropriate role .Once you select the appropriate role ,SharePoint will automatically turn on and configure the necessary services based on the server’s role.

Now that we have understood about MinRole, let’s understand how to deploy a SharePoint 2016 farm using MinRole topology.

2.How to deploy a SharePoint 2016 farm using MinRole topology?

Before I go ahead and discuss about how to deploy a SharePoint 2016 farm using MinRole topology, let’s refresh ourselves by taking a glance at the default SharePoint 2013 streamlined topology which we’re already used to. Let’s look at the image below to understand about the default SharePoint 2013 streamlined topology…

So as shown in the image above, in SharePoint 2013 when you create or add a new server to the farm you have to manually go to the “Manage services on server “section on Central administration site and turn on the required services after which you would be configuring the required service application (Ex: Search Service Application, Managed metadata service application, User Profile service application & Distributed Cache service application etc.…)

However, the good news with SharePoint 2016 you don’t need to spend time on turning on the required services under “Manage services on Server “. You just need to focus on choosing the required role on the “Specify server role “window which I just described above and SharePoint will take care of the rest for you. Hang on, let’s be clear here …. SharePoint will only take care of automatically turning on the required services but the service application has to be configured by you as an admin. I guess while reading this, you must have this question in mind … “Well this is cool, but how does SharePoint manages to do this by itself? “…The answer to this follows, when you create a new farm or join a machine to an existing farm, SharePoint starts the base set of service instances that are required for the server’s role. It also detects which additional services have been enabled in the farm and starts the matching service instances as appropriate for the server’s role. Finally, it detects which service applications have been created in the farm and which services are necessary to support those service applications. Those service instances will be started as appropriate for the server’s role, as well.

MinRole management of service instances doesn’t happen only when you join a server to a farm. As you enable or disable services in the farm, or as you create and delete service applications in the farm, MinRole starts and stops service instances on the existing servers in the farm. This ensures that each server in your SharePoint farm is running exactly the services it needs.

So, the end result is, you as a SharePoint farm administrator can only focus on what services you want to run in your farm and not worry about where they’re running. The MinRole topology in SharePoint will take care of the rest.

Also, let’s take a look at the image below which illustrates how the SharePoint services are scattered between these different server roles while using MinRole topology.

All the user interactive scenarios would be running on the WFE role, all the background tasks such as Search, UPS etc. would be running on the APP role and finally the caching services would be running on the DC role .

Well, hang on …. I still didn’t tell you how to deploy a SharePoint 2016 farm using MinRole. There’s two variants to do this … 1. Using the SharePoint product configuration wizard 2. Using PowerShell.

Using the SharePoint Configuration Wizard:

So, you can choose the role of a server while adding it to the farm using the below mentioned screen which you get while running the product configuration wizard.

Using PowerShell:

Now that we have understood how to deploy a SharePoint 2016 server /farm using MinRole, let’s try to understand the different roles available in MinRole topology.

Different server roles in MinRole:

The below mentioned image from one of my presentations on SharePoint 2016 clearly illustrates the different roles that are available in MinRole.

So, based on your need/architecture planning you can choose the appropriate role. However, this architecture might sound quite costly because with MinRole you can’t add two application roles together like how we used to do in SharePoint 2013 for small farms with 4 to 6 servers, meaning you don’t get to enjoy the privilege of having Search and Managed metadata or may be Search and User Profile service running on the same server. In MinRole if you do so then that particular server would be marked as non-compliant. But Microsoft has listened to its customers about this and has made some changes to the MinRole feature in Feature Pack 1 release for SharePoint 2016 and I’ll be talking in detail about that later on this article.

Note: The concept of Service packs is gone in SharePoint 2016 and is now replaced with Feature packs. You don’t get to see Service packs anymore at least on SharePoint 2016. Also, the Feature packs won’t be as separate packages like your service packs which gets released separately( i.e. once in 12 months as a separate package ). A particular month’s CU/PU would be called as a feature pack where Microsoft would ship all the fixes/new features and that month’s CU would be called as Feature Pack. Till now Microsoft has release Feature Pack 1 (i.e. Nov 2016 CU) and you can find the details about that in this link below . So, a specific month’s CU would be released as a FP hereafter .

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3127940/november-8,-2016,-update-for-sharepoint-server-2016-kb3127940

Microsoft was quite ahead of their schedule while they released FP1 as the original release date was planned on 2017 .However they managed to release that on Q4 of 2016 itself .

This image below depicts the roadmap for SharePoint Server 2016 :

Alright , let’s jump into the different type of topologies in MinRole .

Different type of MinRole topologies :

Now that we have seen a lot about MinRole , I guess it really begs the question of how to choose the appropriate SharePoint topology while using MinRole . Well , let’s go and take a look at it . Shall we ?

A typical SharePoint 2013 Topology :

This is how a typical SharePoint 2013 Topology would look like . Please check the image below .

In this case the SharePoint Administrators manually configure services on each server to fit these roles and in addition that as features and services are added, administrators have to determine where these components should run based on best practices, current server load, etc.

But this is not the case with SharePoint 2016 MinRole Topology , since this is a role based architecture you can directly choose the role you want to deploy and MinRole will take care of the rest . Please check the image below which depicts a SharePoint 2016 MinRole topology architecture .

SharePoint 2016 MinRole Topology :

MinRole topology.PNG

As shown in the image above, you need not less than 4 servers to deploy a SharePoint 2016 farm. If you’re including SQL then in that case you need at least 5 servers for MinRole. Also , Minimum configuration does not have any resiliency.

Let’s see how this works when you want to plan a SharePoint 2016 HA farm with MinRole topology .

So, as you can see in the image above , two servers are required for each role . When it comes to Distributed cache three servers are required in a cluster quorum . We also need SQL availability groups to achieve HA in the SQL layer. So, in total you might require 13 servers altogether if you’re also adding Office Online server in HA .

However , this count may vary based on your architecture and planning . Please check the image below where I’ve designed a HA SharePoint 2016 farm with proper planning .In this case the total number of servers required is 18 .So the point to note here , based on your business needs you can scale out the total number of servers for HA .

Custom 3 Tier MinRole Topology:

This is how a custom 3 tier MinRole topology looks like. The front-end servers are benefited from MinRole. The custom server role is used to configure custom servers to run majority of SharePoint service applications and reduce the number of servers. Unlike MinRole, the services have to be manually configured on the custom server role. It’s the job of the SharePoint Administrators to configure the required services on the custom server.

custome 3 tier.PNG

Custom HA Topology with Search:

This is how this architecture has been planned,

Two load balanced servers with Front-end role.
Two custom servers running distributed cache, User Profile Sync, Secure Store.
Two servers with Search server role.
SQL servers configured with always on availability groups.

5.MinRole -Before and after Feature Pack 1:

Now, if you see the complete overview of MinRole you might understand that you need high budget to implement this due to the total number of servers required. Unlike SharePoint 2013, you don’t get to add the roles together in a single server (i.e. Custom Role) while using MinRole topology and this might increase the budget and many customers have reported the same concern to Microsoft. As always, Microsoft listened to their customer’s feedback and they’ve made some changes to this in Feature pack 1. Let’s look at that in the image below.

I guess the image above gives a detailed explanation about the changes to MinRole topology post FP1 . So, post FP1 you can add two roles together which will reduce the total number of servers required to build a SharePoint 2016 farm using MinRole.

post FP1.png

If you’re interested in knowing more about the new features that was introduced in Feature Pack 1, please take a look at the link below.

https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/26/announcing-feature-pack-1-for-sharepoint-server-2016-cloud-born-and-future-proof/

The benefits of using MinRole:

Listed below are the benefits of using MinRole.

Simpler Deployments
Improved Performance and Reliability
Simpler Capacity Planning and Farm Scalability.

Simpler Deployments:

SharePoint Administrators no longer need to worry about which services have been enabled on which servers.
Administrators can reduce the risk of slight misconfigurations during installation by leveraging a template-type deployment.
Administrators can focus on what functionality to enable in the farm and let SharePoint take care of the rest.

Improved Performance and Reliability:

Microsoft has been operating SharePoint online since 2011 and has analyzed key performance characteristics of operating SharePoint at an internet scale such as CPU, Memory, disk I/O and network latency.
SharePoint has been optimized for MinRole topology based on all that analysis /learning which Microsoft learned from operating SharePoint Online in their own datacenters for years.
Improved service application load balancer services requests from local service instances instead of going across the farm to another server.

Simpler Capacity Planning and Farm Scalability:

In SharePoint 2016, Microsoft bases capacity planning on the MinRole topology.
Leverage predictable and perspective capacity-planning guidance by deploying a farm based on the MinRole topology.
As SharePoint needs grow, easily add more servers to the farm and SharePoint will automatically configure the additional servers.

MinRole Administration:

You can administer MinRole from the Central administration site and also via PowerShell

Using Central Administration site:

You can change the role of a server after it’s deployed and also check whether the server is complaint from the central administration site itself. The same can be achieved using PowerShell as well. A server in the farm which was acting as WFE today can be made as a APP tomorrow and once you change the role SharePoint will automatically turn on and off the required services .

Using PowerShell:

Note: There’s some bugs that has already been identified and reported to MS while toggling the role of server from the Central Administration site and hence it’s better to use PowerShell to change the role of a server

8.MinRole compliancy:

Once a Server’s role is configured, only those services appropriate for that role can run on that server.
SharePoint 2016 has a new set of Health Analyzer rules and timer jobs to identify when a server isn’t MinRole complaint.
If a service is accidently turned on and shouldn’t be running on that server, SharePoint will automatically turn it off.

9.Opting out of MinRole:

As a SharePoint administrator, you can always say no to MinRole if you’re not planning to use it. This can be achieved by assigning some/all the servers in the farm to the custom role and then manually manage service instances on these servers. Also, you need to consider using “ServerRoleOptional” parameter when creating a new SharePoint farm if existing deployments script needs to remain intact.

10.How/where to deploy 3^rd party apps while using MinRole?

Well, the answer to this simple. Yes, you guessed it correctly, so it’s the “Custom Role” that you need to choose while deploying any third-party applications such as (Ninetex Workflows, AvePoint etc.). In addition to that, services like PerformancePoint, PowerPivot etc. would best fit in the custom role.

MinRole is truly phenomenal and would definitely reduce the risk and the time taken by a SharePoint administrator to deploy a SharePoint 2016 farm. Microsoft has done an awesome job in introducing MinRole on SharePoint 2016 which would definitely reduce all our burdens as SharePoint administrators. Thanks for reading this post …. Happy SharePointing!!!

Webcast of SharePoint Virtual Summit:

For those who missed to attend the SharePoint Virtual Summit session which was held on May 16th , please make use of the link below to watch the webcast on demand

https://event.microsoft.com/events/2017/1705/SharepointSummit/

Watch the webcast to learn how to create a connected workplace in Office 365 with OneDrive and SharePoint, integrated with Yammer, Microsoft Teams, Windows, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.

In this webcast , Microsoft has unveiled the latest innovations and roadmap, and you’ll learn how industry-leading customers are leveraging these technologies as part of their digital transformation. Discover how Office 365, connected with Windows and Azure, is reinventing productivity for you, your teams and your organization.

Happy SharePointing !!!