If your coming across to this blog then hopefully you are aware of the new features coming to SharePoint 2016 and in this case I’ll be looking at the new Min Role feature.
Now in essance this is a good thing however there is the seen arguement that this really will be for the Large Scale farms of anywhere between 10 - 100 SharePoint Servers.
The ease of being able to configure a New farm server - perhaps to replace another failing server or just to provide that additional capacity - and to from configuration tell it what role to perform has been available by utilising PowerShell Desired State Configuration or even using AutoSPInstaller and although this seems to have a similar purpose there are some fundamental differences
For MinRole
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Built Directly into the SharePoint Code base - This provides a more natural feel to it and can be utilised by a Non-SharePoint admin (if SharePoint 2016 Foundation ever gets released - Though its not looking like it at all )
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Role specific health monitoring - Now this is both a positive and a negative in my view - The positive is that this applies the right health monitoring rules that are specific to the role however, and I hope that the next few months when more announcements are made this worry will be put to sleep, this could Automatically cause issues when services are identified as running on a server that they shouldnt be and then will Automatically stop them. This was something that from what I’ve seen so far isnt particularly clear and therefore we will need to see how this pans out.
For PS DSC
- May actually be more beneficial for the Generic Windows Server admin - I’m thinking the smaller shops that maybe have a Foundation Install instead of being littered with Shared Drives
- More Versitile than MinRole - as you could have a smaller farm and MinRole seems a very much Medium/Large Farm scaled solution.
For AutoSPInstaller
- Overlooked but this is a good use case for the Dev/Non Production scaled farms - Talking here of a Half Capacity farm for Pre-Production.
- Easier for the Non-SharePoint Admins to work with - Good for dev Environment set up for consistency with other devs in the Organisation
Overall I think that it is premature to determine the best solution going forward for all outfits
However the fact there is now further choice means that its a step in the right direction - Choice is always a good thing and I for one will look forward to hearing more about MinRole