SharePoint 2016

Microsoft's SharePoint 2016 New Features

Ladies and Gentlemen: Microsoft has officially made SharePoint 2016’s first public beta available for us to play with. As expected, on the last month August 2015, we can now install SharePoint 2016 to see what this first preview is made of. I’ve had the chance to play for a few days, here's everything you need to know.

System Requirements

Scenario	Deployment type and scale	Processor	RAM	Hard disk
Database server running a single SQL instance	Development or evaluation installation with the minimum recommended services	64-bit, 4 cores	12-16 GB	80 GB for system drive 100 GB for second drive
Database server running a single SQL instance	Pilot, user acceptance test running all available services	64-bit, 4 cores	16-24 GB	80 GB for system drive 100 GB for second drive and additional drives
Web server or application server in a three-tier farm	Development or evaluation installation with the minimum number of services	64-bit, 4 cores	8-12 GB	80 GB for system drive 80 GB for second drive
Web server or application server in a three-tier farm	Pilot, user acceptance test running all available services	64-bit, 4 cores	12-16 GB	80 GB for system drive 80 GB for second drive and additional drives

Upgrade and Migration

SharePoint Server 2016 will support upgrade from SharePoint Server 2013.  To upgrade from SharePoint Server 2013 to SharePoint Server 2016, you can use the database-attach method to upgrade. In the database-attach method, you first create and configure a SharePoint Server 2016 farm. Then you copy the content and service application databases from the SharePoint Server 2013 farm, and then attach and upgrade the databases.  This upgrades the data to the new version.

NOTE Site collections provisioned in backward compatible SharePoint 2010 (14) mode, must be upgraded to 2013 prior to upgrading to SharePoint Server 2016.  For additional information on upgrading site collections to SharePoint 2013 

 

 MinRole Overview

One of the early new infrastructure advancements in SharePoint Server 2016 is a new concept, MinRole. MinRole is designed to transform guidance into code, simplifying deployment and scale with SharePoint ensuring a request is served end-to-end by the receiving server based on the origination of the request (I.e. end user or batch processing) and role of the destination server.

In previous versions of SharePoint, installation is role agnostic, which being a SharePoint servers’ role was only defined by what services were provisioned and its placement in a SharePoint Farm topology.  In many cases to serve a request, whether end user initiated or otherwise, the request traversed the scope of the SharePoint topology.

MinRole provides an out-of-the-box experience that provides topology recommendations, simplifies on-premises server farm deployments, and reduces the unit of scale to simplify capacity planning while providing predictable performance characteristics through enabling selective provisioning of SharePoint server roles based on position and function within a topology.

Role Name	Description
Special Load	Reserved for services to be isolated from other services, I.e. 3rd party, PerformancePoint, etc.
Web Front End	Services end user requests, optimized for low latency.
Single Server Farm	Provisions all services on the server for a single server deployment.  This role is provided for evaluation and development purposes.
Search	Reserved for Search services.
Application	Services the backend jobs or the requests triggered by backend jobs, optimized for high throughput.
Distributed Cache	Services distributed cache for the farm. Optionally, the server assigned to this role can load balance end user requests among the web front ends.

MinRole enables an administrator to select the appropriate server role for a specific server.

provisioning SharePoint Server 2016 based on five (5) predefined configurations:A predefined server role is configured and optimized for its intended purpose provisioning the expected services designed to support its function within a server farm environment.In SharePoint Server 2016 MinRole can be instrumented through the PSConfig GUI or command line.

Single Server Farm

Single Server farm is still an option for SharePoint 2016, but you don't get SQL Server Express included in the installation. If you want to create a single server farm, you'll need to install SQL Server independently of the SharePoint installation.

Patching

 The patching process for current versions of SharePoint as being cumbersome and complex. "In the past with SharePoint, for general updates you got about 37 individual files to process for each patch, plus 10 for each language pack installed. In SharePoint 2016, you get 2 files to process, plus 1 file per language pack." The biggest improvement in patching for SharePoint 2016 is In-place, online, installation of patches. You can install the patches in the middle of the day without affecting users accessing the farm at all. "You no longer have to maintain a highly redundant farm just to facilitate the patching process,"

Boundaries And Limits

SharePoint 2016 is getting a serious upgrade in the sheer amount of data that it can handle. The maximum content database size, while not yet finalized, is expected to be in the 1 TB range, up from the current maximum of 200 GB. Content databases will be able to hold approximately 100,000 site collections.Lists and libraries get an upgrade, too. The maximum size of items in a view will be raised from 2,000 to 5,000. Libraries will be able to hold large documents, with the maximum file size being raised from 2 GB to 10 GB.Search Indexed also doubles the scale, with searchable items growing to a maximum of 500 million items.

 

Fast Site Creation

One of the things that takes the longest during site collection creation is the provisioning of all of the site features. This is something that doesn't happen if you simply clone an existing site collection, because all of the provisioning has already taken place.In SharePoint 2106, the site collection process will rely much more on the cloning of existing site collections, which increases the speed that they can be deployed and also extends more options for setting default site collection templates and master copies.

 

Durable Links

Durable Links provide a resource Id based link for Web Application Open Platform Interface Protocol (WOPI) documents served by SharePoint and Office Online Server. The resource Id assigned to individual documents is stored in the content database related to the source document. When using Durable Links when a user selects a link to a specific document, SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview looks up the file by the resource Id and opens it in Office Online Server Preview.  Durable Links allow documents to be moved and renamed without affecting the integrity of the linking Url associated with a document.

Example (Renaming a Document)

In the illustration below a document exists with the Title property polasoft .docx with the absolute Url: https://<server>/Shared%20Documents/polasoft.docx?d=w6143f2e64f201322eacd269bb84649ae.

In the illustration below the source document polasoft .(Final).docx with the absoluteUrl:https://<server>/Shared%20Documents/polasoft(Final).docx?d=w6143f2e64f201322eacd269bb84649ae.

In either scenario the link will return the original document based on the resource Id assigned to the document (w6143f2e64f201322eacd269bb84649ae).

Search Scale and Resiliency Improvements

Improvements in performance and scale in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview search now allow search to scale up to 500 million items, an increase of 250 million items SharePoint Server 2013 based on 10 million items per index partition.  In SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview each index partition contains a subset of the whole search index. If the number of indexed items is high in relation to how much memory the server has, affects the query response time negatively.  SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview has been improved to support 20 million items per index partition, where 500 million items are based on 25x index partitions.

In addition to improving the search scale boundaries as described above, SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview makes a number of general performance optimizations in the query path to reduce overall latency, implements changes in merge scheduling reducing peak disk and memory usage from ~210% steady state consumption to ~140% enabling larger index partitions while avoiding a large resource buffer.

While improvements in scale and performance allow substantially larger index partitions, as the number of partitions increase, so does the need for resiliency.  SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview implements new failover logic for serving queries between index replicas which improves the ability to respond to overload to include immediate recovery when the overload is removed.