Optimizing the process of deploying SharePoint Packages to minimize the impact on farm’s availability

Extracted from the original article

If you have deployed SharePoint Packages in the past, you know, that, unless you have a second farm, deploying SharePoint Packages means outage to your Web Applications. There are however a few things that you can control to minimize the impact on the availability of your websites.

The deployment process is a black box

The process of deploying SharePoint Packages might seem to you like a blackbox. Not surprisingly: you build a SharePoint Package, add it to your SharePoint farm and finally deploy it to one or more Web Applications. Except for scheduling when the deployment should be executed, it seems like there isn’t much you can tweak. It turns out however, that there is some fine print in the deployment process and changing a few things in your deployment process could help you minimize the impact on the availability of your websites during the deployment process.

When talking about deployment process of SharePoint Packages, I mean the deployment itself as well as retracting and upgrading SharePoint Packages. All of those are being managed by the same Timer Job so to keep things simple I’ll refer to all of those as the deployment process.

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