Deploying Custom Features to Live SharePoint 2010 Environment

Question

I have been working on some customisation for SharePoint 2010 using Visual Studio. My Visual Studio project contains custom web parts and pages. I have been deploying and testing my customisations within my SharePoint development environment without any issues.

I will need to deploy these changes to a live SharePoint environment that has load balanced front end web servers.

Will I need to install Visual Studio on both load balanced servers and is there any pre deployment procedures I need to carry out?

Many Thanks.

Answer 1

In your development environment, Visual Studio 2010 automatically does the packaging and deploying for you.

To migrate these packages to your production environment, go to the /bin directory of your project, and there should be a wsp in there. Copy that to your server.

Then use either stsadm or powershell to install/deploy them. They will be pushed out to all WFE in the farm.

NO you dont need to install Visual Studio on the live servers

It is usually a good idea to get a scheduled window for deploying, as sometimes the release will reset the application pool, or you may need to reset IIS/server (depending on your setup/configuration)