I was trying to figure out how to help a client from moving from a SharePoint 2007 farm with several web applications to a SharePoint 2010 farm. At first my thoughts were, just migrate to a new SharePoint 2010 farm, but that was a bit too simple. As it turns out all web applications were websites with unique names.
Thinking about what could be a solution for this client, I came up with the idea of using a Host Header Multi-Tenant farm. The only problem is that you can’t have your https://cms site and an (extended) public website http://www. When host header site collections are created you can’t use AAM anymore. A solution to that problem can be overcome by using content deployment.
In order to test this theory, I began building 2 SharePoint farms and build them as a Multi-Tenant farm.
For each tenant in the authoring farm I created a host header site collection and give it the blank internet template. At first I created in the other farm tenants with the same template, but that resulted in a failed deployment. After reading the content deployment article on TechNet it was clear that the tenants in the receiving farm need no template, but need the template picker in order to receive the first deployment package.
What is Multi-tenancy?
To Quote Spence Harbar:
In a word, it’s Hosting! A unique deployment for each customer on a shared set of infrastructure resources. The most common scenarios are
- “Traditional” Web Hosting Environments
- SharePoint Online
- Corporate On Premise Deployments
The best info can be found in the Rational Guide To Multi Tenancy with SharePoint 2010 by Spence Harbar http://www.harbar.net/articles/sp2010mt1.aspx
What is Content Deployment?
According to Microsoft TechNet: Content deployment is a feature of Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 that you can use to copy content from a source site collection to a destination site collection either manually or on a predetermined schedule.
This can be achieved by deploying to another farm
or by deploying to another web application within a farm.
More info on Content deployment can be found on TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263428.aspx
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