Infrastructure design of a Microsoft Business Intelligence solution

In the job description of a Technical Architect, one often finds few items that architects might want to avoid getting involved. This is about fitting nuts, bolts and wires to rig different servers and components. Yes, you guessed right, it's designing the infrastructure and connecting all server and components at the physical layer. Personally I do not enjoy this task a lot, but still it drops on me as a part of my job. The major challenge in this task remains to keep a track of what ports are supported by corporate policies on which servers. Again different server products talk on certain default and other supported ports. It is very easy to get lost in this spider web of connections. Again on the top of these port configurations, there are protocols like HTTP, TCP etc, firewalls and federation servers for single-signon. It always helps to have a handy reference checklist of these port and protocols that make different servers and server technologies talk to each other.

In any typical Technical Architecture document, at a minimum, you specify details on how developers would connect to your application server which would in-turn connect to DB server, and these details without fail would need ports and protocols related details. This can grow as complex as the number of servers and components you have in your solution design. Hardware estimation and sizing is one other such area, but you might find sizing tools for the same which can provide an estimate based on the projections you provide for your target environment. Below are two such diagrams from a Sharepoint perspective which gives an overview of what kind of details you would require for an infra design perspective to rig your solution.

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