7 Steps to SharePoint 2013 HA Farm in Azure

QUESTION:  How many months, weeks, days does it take to provision the infrastructure to deploy your SharePoint FARM?   What if with careful design and planning; you’ll be up and running in minutes using the Azure cloud to configure, deploy, and manage all the infrastructure required for you next SharePoint deployment.

The REMAINING time can be focused on INNOVATION and GROWTH of BUSINESS activities required to drive your business to the next level with more focus.

You can now easily deploy a two or three-tier SharePoint Server 2013 farm in Azure. This is designed to help you quickly create an Internet-facing SharePoint farm for dev/test, demonstration, or proof-of-concept purposes.

The SharePoint 2013 HA Farm template deploys a SharePoint Server 2013 three-tier farm topology including Active Directory Domain Services and Microsoft SQL Server in a high-availability configuration with nine servers and 29 cores (using default virtual machine sizes). The completed deployment consists of two Windows Server 2012 R2 domain controllers, two SQL Server 2014 servers and a cluster majority node server configured with SQL Server Always On Availability Groups, and four SharePoint Server 2013 servers (two web front ends and two application servers).

Each farm is configured with just a single web application and site collection. The SharePoint service application deployment is left to you to configure.

Create a SharePoint HA Farm in Minutes using Azure Deployment template.   Focus on the WHY Focus on the WHEN   Less focus on HOW; let the Azure Deployment wizard guide you through the installation.

 

 

SharePoint farm name	Name our FARM
Subscription Type	Based on your subscription enrollment
Resource Group	Resource Group to manage your resources
Location	Where in the World you want to host?

 

 

 

Username	Administrator account to manage the virtual machines
Password	Password for the account
Confirm Password
Storage account name prefix	Prefix to name your storage account
Storage account type   With estimate pricing per Month for Storage per 100GB; pick the storage configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements
Virtual Network Name	Name of the Virtual network or reuse an existing one already created

 

 

 

Forest root domain name	Fully qualified domain name
Active Directory virtual machine size   With estimate pricing per Month; pick the configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements

 

 

 

SQL Server virtual machine size   With estimate pricing per Month; pick the configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements
SQL Witness virtual machine size   With estimate pricing per Month; pick the configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements
Service account name	Account to run the SQL services
Service account password	Account password
Confirm password

 

 

 

Public IP address for SharePoint web tier	Name space for Public IP address to get assigned
Domain name label for SharePoint web tier	DNS label for SharePoint web tier
SharePoint virtual machine size   With estimate pricing per Month; pick the configuration based on the requirements based on the high availability requirements
Setup user account username & password	Domain account used to run setup SharePoint product installation
Server farm account username & password	Domain account used to run the SharePoint Central Administration services
SharePoint farm passphrase	Secure the farm used to protect farm; required to join additional resources to the farm
Content Site Template

 

 

 

You may want to download the template as JSON to create another FARM as required for test, stage, acceptance, pre-production, or for any other purpose required by defining the requirements for your environments.

 

 

 

 

 

Additional Information

Microsoft Azure Documentation Center –

 

Office 365 talk

The part that is still a bit unknown is SharePoint.

Specifically, we would need to have a SharePoint server in-house, running a hybrid environment.

What is drives this decision?

Hybrid deployments are complex and costly requiring multiple servers

Points of concern:

We want to be able to work locally and remotely; however, the remote option is secondary to quickly accessing files from a server internally. 

– Using SharePoint Online allows for work on any device, anywhere, anytime – you need a USERNAME / PASSWORD or optionally configure multi-factor authentication.

We are not willing to put everything in the Microsoft cloud as it just doesn't work for us operationally speaking.

Can you describe your typical operational day for the different types of workers?

We have tried to implement systems in the past where we asked people to download files in a check-in/check-out process people have to download things continuously to work with them offline

One Drive for Business allows for editing within the browser; no download; no check out; however, depends a bit on those operational process and the type of worker

We also need to be able to have both Microsoft files as well as Adobe Creative Suite files in the same client directories. 

Document libraries are what they are called; they can store many different file types; there are some files which are excluded (such as viruses signatures) and any type of executable file.

Surrounding the SharePoint hybrid I wanted to give you a bit more information so you can plan accordingly and get me the most accurate pricing. We can assume we would have less than 250 users accessing SharePoint Server 2013. So I believe we need 1 SharePoint Server 2013 license and 250 CALs. 

A lot! A typical on premise installation without Hybrid in the equation is 3 servers; 4 if you plan to use Web Applications; 3 SharePoint Server Licenses and 1 SQL Server License. If we start to introduce any type of Business Intelligence generally this installed on its own server. When we talk about Hybrid; then some additionally PROXY servers are necessary to allow on premise to talk to online.

Topical Traditional Typologies from Technet - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=257304 

6 Requirements mapped to SharePoint

Requirements listed with some quick links to more details:

Requirement	Capabilities
Give us a place to put all files (possibly including CAD)	Document Library – working with document libraries
Allow us to search for a document based on keywords found inside the document or in the file-name?	Crawling and crawled properties
Allow us to categorize documents based on certain criteria (accounting, customer name, etc) for faster searches?	Content Type workshop and planning for logical and physical configuration
Allow for archiving or purging old documents?  As we add more and more documents the storage needed will grow.  At some point we will need to purge.	Information Management policy
Allow for revision control of files so we can easily see and maintain multiple versions of files	Version control planning workshop for logical and physical configuration
Allow for easy access to files/folders for users across the WAN (small 1 meg connection)?	SkyDrive Pro or Office Web Applications including Browser support planning and mobile support planning along with overall capacity planning