Deploying Development Farms

Developers in an organization that makes heavy use of SharePoint often need environments to test new applications, web parts, solutions, and other SharePoint customization. These developers often need a sandbox area where these solutions can be tested, and potentially one with different characteristics from production. These environments are also typically quickly provisioned and deprovisioned, so test environments are not the best location for them.

For these organizations, it may make sense to deploy one or more development farms so that developers have the opportunity to run their tests and develop software for SharePoint independent of the existing production environment. When developed, these applications can first be tested in the test farm and then finally deployed into production. For information on automating the creating of test farms using virtual host management software, refer to Chapter 12.