In sharepoint installation. from the two options standalone or serverfarm which one is choosen

Question

on Sharepoint development purpose. on installing sharepoint2o1o whether standalone option or server farm better suited for developememt

Answer 1

• Standalone will install SQL Express on your machine and use it for your Sharepoint instance.
• Server Farm will install Sharepoint on existing SQL Server instance if you already have one on either your machine or somewhere else on the network.

So it depends whether you already have SQL Server installed on your machine or not. A standalone installation is actually what it says. It will install as a standalone product without any other product requirement.

I prefer server farm installation because I rather have full SQL Server installed and used by other apps as well. I find SQL Express installation a waste of resources when I already have a full fledged server.

Answer 2

SQL Express is limited to 4GB. If you think your development environment may exceed that, then go for the Server Farm. As for me, we already have a full farm for staging and production, so I get no additional benefit from running a server farm installation in dev. @Robert-Koritnik has a good point that, if you're already running a full SQL instance on your box, you might consider Server Farm just to avoid having another instance of SQL Server on the box. I tend to do my development within a VM, so Standalone works just peachy for me.

Answer 3

Just as a matter of interest. Dont use Standalone for ANY production environment as it limits you in that you cannot add any more WFEs or scale out at all.

If you have a SQL Server license (Not express) , then always choose Farm.