SP2013 Development Environment

Question

Curious how people are setting up their development environments for SharePoint 2013.

Is it cost effective to setup everything in the cloud? Seems not because Azure keeps charging you even if your VM's are shut down. Am I missing something or is there another cloud option that is low cost?

The other option in my mind is to build a box with 32gigs of ram and run VM's.

Thanks for your ideas and tips.

Answer 1

Okay, Cloudshare is not the way to go. I went to the TechEd 2013 last week:

@hupseb: Seems to be very easy to put #SharePoint 2013 into #Azure. Check out the slides: http://t.co/CwMaSykfim #tee13

It is very easy to run the Powershellskript in the link above. It needs only 30 minutes and you have a small tier in the azure cloud.

With the big MSDN acc you have 150€ free each month. Thats about 150h time to work.

Try it!

Here are the scripts: https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools-samples

Here are the cloud benefits: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/msdn-benefits/

Here again the presentation: http://co1-powerpoint.officeapps.live.com/p/mPPT.aspx?PowerPointView=ReadingView&ui=de%2DDE&rs=de%2DDE&WOPISrc=http%3A%2F%2Fco1%2D15%2Dview%2Dwopi%2Ewopi%2Elive%2Enet%3A808%2Foh%2Fwopi%2Ffiles%2F%40%2FwFileId%3FwFileId%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fvideo%252Ech9%252Ems%252Fsessions%252Fteched%252Feu%252F2013%252FMDC%252DB213%252Epptx&access_token=1&access_token_ttl=0&wdMobileHost=2

If you deside to use your notebook only you can work on it and you need SSDs and for Search Development much RAM in SharePoint 2013.

So if you need it for yourself buy fat SSDs otherwise use Azure with your MSDN acc!!!!!!!!

Answer 2

I made the biggest list on the planet (maybe even the universe) of different ways to setup a SharePoint 2013 Development Environment on my blog. I personally have several including:

• a cheap refurbished 64bit desktop from dell auctions converted into a server with Technet subscriptions and then upgraded the RAM
• a MSDN Azure account (as I think only MDSN accounts get the no charge when
  turned off benefit). It is true that normal accounts (at this time at least) cost a fortune, $230 for 1 month before I turned off my
  regular one and switched to MSDN.
• Office 365 account
• VM with SharePoint 2013 & VM with SharePoint 2010 running on VMware on my laptop. But you seriously need an SSD (or two) and 24GB-32GB on your laptop to make this work.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Azure

Microsoft changed the usage of Azure, and added a lot to make it "dev" friendly. If you have an MSDN account you get a monthly stipend you can use on any Azure service, and those services are discounted in some situations as much as 90% so you can get usage from Azure in that scenario.

• No Charge for Stopped VMs
• Pay by the Minute Billing
• MSDN Use Rights now supported on Windows Azure
• Heavily Discounted MSDN Dev/Test Rates
• MSDN Monthly Monetary Credits
• Portal Support for Better Tracking MSDN Monetary Credit Usage

See Scott Guthrie's Blog for detail on the above: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/06/03/windows-azure-announcing-new-dev-test-offering-biztalk-services-ssl-support-with-web-sites-ad-improvements-per-minute-billing.aspx

CloudShare

CloudShare has a pretty good story at $59 a month. I think you will need to bump that up to get resources to run 2013 better than what you get with that plan. They have a free trial.

Laptop

I've ran into a few people with some massive laptops running 32GB Ram for dev and test purposes. From my conversation with those doing Dev, this is a minimum for serious work.