Little things about SharePoint Foundation 2013

Hi there everybody. Long time no see. I've been super, ultra busy working this year (especially this summer), and haven't had time to indulge in my usual pasttimes quite as much as I'd like.

Right now I am preparing to go to Sweden and present two sessions at the SEF 2012 event in Stockholm. Both of my sessions are about SharePoint Foundation 2013(most of the sessions at the event are about SharePoint 2013 actually, I guess everyone's excited).

To that end there are a few quirks I'd like to point out about SharePoint Foundation 2013, particularly the Public Preview version (which is the version I'm using since the release version doesn't come out until after I get back from SEF).

So on to some notes:

- When installing SharePoint Foundation 2013 preview-- I chose not to use the 2012 versions of SQL and Server at this point. One new thing at a time, thanks.

To that end-- Server 2008 R2 must have:

• Service pack 1 installed and all updates to this point

I'm using SQL 2008 R2, Enterprise. SQL requires:

• MaxDOP set to 1 (In SQL Server Mgmt Studio, right click the server icon in Object Explorer pane, go to it's properties. In the properties box, click on Advanced in the select a page area, change value of Max Degree of Parallelism to 1)

Then after you install the SharePoint Foundation 2013 prerequisites you need to download and install:

• KB 2554876
• KB 2708075
• KB 2472264

After you finish the install, if you choose to do a complete, farm installation, you will need to configure services. There are many, many more service applications than before. The configure your farm wizard will want to use the same service account for all of them, and any databases it creates will have long GUIDs in the name. Despite that, for your first try, you might want the wizard to do the configuration for you just to see things working. Later you can change the service accounts in Central Administration (or in powershell if you'd like). And even later, when you do another practice installation, you can chose to not use the wizard
New Services:

• Secure Store (yay, now you can use it for BCS)
• Search (only one though, you can have several search service applications like you can for Server)
• App Management (to be used to manage the installation of "Apps" in the farm, requires EXTENSIVE set up outside of the service application itself)
• State Service
• Lotus Notes Connector (ironically, in case you need to search lotus notes implementations)

There is also Distributed Cache service and Request Management, which are carry overs from Server 2010 and are used by Search, so they have ended up in SharePoint Foundation 2013 as well. You can't really configure them as service applications, you can only start or stop them as services. Distributed Cache service takes up A LOT of RAM, and if you only have one SharePoint Foundation 2013 server in your farm, you can safely turn it off. Request Management doesn't need to be started unless you have multiple SharePoint Foundation servers in your farm, because it helps manage which server answers which client request (kind of a SharePoint aware task load balancer).

Remember that SharePoint Foundation 2013, specifically because of the practically infinite increase in Search services, require almost 4 times the RAM that it needed for the 2010 version. And this is not a joke. My VM of SPF 2013, with no users using it, just sitting idle, need 4GB of RAM to function. So when they say it needs 8 GB of RAM, it is not an idle threat. It uses huge, huge amounts of RAM. Especially if you set search to do continuous crawls.

"Continuous crawls, what's that," You say? Ah, that's the point of my new "SharePoint Foundation 2013 and how search grew up" session. :)