Sunday 1 November 2015

SharePoint 2016 Preview - Min Role

Overview:  SharePoint 2016 Min Roles before the public betas.  Things are going to change and this only obviously applies to SP2016 Preview on-prem.

"Min Role is basically a topology assistance service"

Installation:  The services are pretty similar to SP2013 and most of the PowerShell from AutoSPInstaller will work with SP2016.  Excel services has been removed.  The difference in the UI install is the ability to have server install min roles for a multi-server.  Min roles are collections of services installed on a machine.  I'd lean towards installing full/custom roles and then converting the specific servers to the specific min roles.

Using the min roles, SharePoint can verify the roles are in compliance and can be used to managed the farm.  In effect you'd need all 4 roles to have all the services on a SharePoint farm and you shall need 2 instances of each for high availability.  So excluding SQL you shall need 8 VM's for a High Availability (HA) farm.  If you install extra services on a min role server, SharePoint timer job shall stop the service on a daily basis (not proven).

There are 4 server roles:
  1. Web Front end,
  2. Distributed Cache (also has a witness/quorum),
  3. Application,
  4. Search
Servers can be changed from Custom to specific min roles or the other way around. 

Note:  FULL High Availaibility
Min 2 times each role (extra quorum for dist cache roles) plus 2 more for Search HA, so 11 for core SP.  Plus SQL AOAG 3 servers, plus WCA/OOS 2 + SP workflow + K2/AvePoint + SSIS