SharePoint 2016

Today, we found a large disparity between Office 365 features and SharePoint 2013 on-premises.  SharePoint 2016 aims to solve this by basically becoming the new code-base for on-premise.  They are back-porting almost all the capabilities in SharePoint Online and bringing them to the on-prem builds.

Hardware Requirements for SharePoint 2016

The hardware requirements really don't change from SharePoint 2013.

Component	Specification
RAM	·         12-16 GB RAM for production ·         more for development
CPU	·         4 cores
Disk	·         80GB for OS

Software Requirements for SharePoint 2016

Things start to change a little when it comes to the software requirements.  The minimum OS and SQL get a bump.

Component	Specification
Operating System	·         Windows Server 2012 R2 ·         Window Server 10
Pre requisites	·         Windows Management Framework ·         Application Server Role ·         Web Server IIS Role ·         .Net Framework 4.5.2 ·         Update for .Net Framework 4 ·         MS SQL Server 2012 Native Client ·         MS Identity Extension ·         MS Sync Framework runtime V1.0 ·         Windows AppFabric 1.1 ·         MS Identity Foundation V1.1 ·         MS Information Protection and Control client ·         MS WCF Data Service

No More SQL Server Express

The big change is that standalone / single server installs will NOT support the Windows Internal database or SQL Server Express.  You MUST install and use SQL Server Standard / Enterprise / Datacenter, etc. It can be on the same server.

Upgrade Paths to SharePoint 2016

The paths are the same as from 2010 to 2013. You can either DB attach or use a 3rd-party migration tool. That hasn’t changed.  But there has been speculation around if you are required to go to 2013 before 2016 or if you can skip.  Bill seemed to put this to rest.  You MUST upgrade to SharePoint 2013 before you can upgrade to SharePoint 2016.  In addition, any site collections that use the 2010 format will have to be converted to 2013 (15) mode before upgrading to 2016.

Another huge change coming down the pipe in upcoming months is a new migration API.  This has been mentioned a lot this week when looking to migrate content to Office 365.  This will help facilitate easier upgrades from on-premise to SharePoint Online / OneDrive for Business scenarios.

Identity

In SharePoint 2016, SAML claims becomes a first-class citizen and the default authentication though it will still support Windows Identity over SAML claims.  Basically this is aimed to set the stage for cloud integration, being cloud ready and trust Azure AD.  This in essence is one authentication provider to rule them all.

Roles & Services

There are some HUGE and fundamental changes going on here.  Defined roles are coming back (think 2007 WFE) to SharePoint 2016 but in a whole different way.  We’ve all seen where a CU will get released; gets pulled due to regression and has to be re-released.  This is because Microsoft can’t test reliability in every combination of service configuration.  They have established what they call MinRoles.  After you install the bits and fire up psconfig then you choose what role this server will perform in the farm.

Think of Search. When you deploy it you have to run all this PowerShell.  Now SharePoint will configure the server with only the necessary bits and services for Search to run on this box and nothing else.  Since SharePoint configured it, they know how it should be and can plan for and test this configuration.  This is seen in new rules in the Health Analyzer and even a Fix it button in Services in Farm in Central Admin if things get out of compliance configuration wise.  You can still create these in PowerShell using a new switch called –isserverrole for psconfig.  Scaling an environment becomes very expected and easy: just stand up a new server; join to the farm and pick a role.

This allows for tremendously smaller update patches: from 40 installer files to 2; 18 language pack files to 1.

Boundaries and Limits

This information is fuzzier but these are the currently planned new limits in SharePoint 2016.

Component	Specification
Content Database size	·         >1 terabyte
# of Site Collections per content DB	·         100,000
List threshold	·         >5000
Max File size	·         increased from 2GB to 10GB ·         removed character restrictions
Search Index	·         500 million items

Other Improvements

• SharePoint 2016 real time telemetry. The User Profile Service will NOT be included in SharePoint. It will be separated and can be run independently from SharePoint
• Project Server has its databases consolidated into the Content DB”
• Files shared will have “durable” links. If they are moved, renamed, etc., the link will still work using resource ID
• Leveraging BITS for faster download/upload of these 10GB files
• Fast Site Collection creation – basically does a SQL table row copy instead of going through API (spsite.copy) in content DB
• Real time telemetry
• Basically much more robust dashboards and analytics from an improved health and usage database
• Allow storage of ODF files in document libraries which any editing program can edit
• Enhancements in compliance for document fingerprinting, classification IDs, etc.
• Cloud Search Service - I will talk about this later
• Extranet – some form of ability leverage Office 365 identity federation service - think external users in SharePoint Online but now in on-prem
• Much easier way to configure hybrid via new UI tool