Strategizing Your Growth Path

Many IT managers are tempted to start with smaller, less powerful servers with the intention of replacing the servers as usage demands. This is a reasonable strategy to a point, but you should take a couple things into consideration if you choose this approach. On the top of this short list is the difficulty involved in migrating STS servers. Avoid this by implementing STS on its own server if you know that’s where you’re headed to begin with. Make sure the server box you use has the necessary capacity.

The other concern is distributing the Views Notification service to a separate box after you’ve run your Project Server implementation for a while. In a white paper titled “Best Practices for an Enterprise Deployment of Microsoft Project Server 2002,” Lou Lucarelli of Microsoft cautions, “If Views Notification services are off-loaded after your deployment of Microsoft Project Server, then you can run into other serious issues, including updating the registry in the Views Notification server, and provisioning errors.” The white paper is available on TechNet and is a must-read for anyone contemplating large-scale implementations. Also see “Distributed Deployment: Microsoft Project 2002,” available on TechNet. TechNet links are very long, so I won’t include them here. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/technet and expand the Products and Technologies tree until you locate the section on Microsoft Project. Go to http://www.projectserverexperts.com for the latest versions of links cited in this book.

With the exception of the preceding two considerations, it’s possible to migrate the database from box to box as it’s fairly simple. Adding or upgrading applications servers running IIS is also doable. You can accomplish these types of migrations by using the installation techniques covered in Chapter 5 and understanding the registry entries covered in Chapter 7.