Software Updates: Minimizing SharePoint Downtime
A common question I get is “why do SharePoint service pack updates take so long?” The main reason, of course, is that unlike a service pack for, say, the Office client, which only needs to update the binaries, SharePoint needs to take two steps: 1) update the binaries, and 2) update the database schema. While the database is being updated, SharePoint is down.
A new article on TechNet, published today, provides some best practices for minimizing your downtime. It’s primarily for enterprise scenarios where avoiding complete downtime is critical. The article describes how to configure a mirrored Office SharePoint Server farm for minimal downtime during an installation of software updates by temporarily setting the content databases in a secondary farm to be read-only (while consuming shared services from a parent farm). It’s not perfect, since users can’t create or modify content. But at least they can get to their data.
