Is a Standalone SharePoint 2010 Server Good Enough as a Test Environment for Production SharePoint Farm

Question

I have inherited SharePoint 2010 at work and would like to test some features we are not utilizing.

I would like a testing environment for SP but being limited on resources, I want to set this up on a single Desktop. Would a Standalone server work or are there too many differences (when it comes to problems and troubleshooting)?

Answer 1

Their are two options for test farm either stand alone or single server farm(complete).

Stand Alone:

The standalone installation type installs SharePoint using the Local Service and Network Service accounts and a SQL Express instance. It is not a farm and has limitations such as:

• Standalone is not a SharePoint farm
• Cannot join additional servers (since it's not a farm)
• Limited database size due to using SQL Express
• Cannot provision the User Profile Synchronization service (since the Local Service account cannot connect to Active Directory)
• While users in a domain can connect and authenticate to sites in a standalone installation,
• you will find that you cannot use the People Picker to get users from AD, again because Local Service cannot contact AD
• All services in the farm are set up and configured on the server, not necessarily configured the way you want.
• Database names are all default names that include GUIDs which some find ugly (and hard to type)

Single Server

• With the complete/server farm option,
• you can create an entire SharePoint farm with any configuration you want.
• You can install an instance of SQL Server on the same server if you want a single-server farm.
• You can have multiple servers and you can configure or not configure any available server.
• Integration with AD works, and in general a farm is more widely supported as most specialists work with farms and not standalone installations.