SharePoint 2013: New Farm Administrator Checklist

New Farm Admin Checklist 

• Identify key staff
• network admins
• sysadmins
• SharePoint admins
• database admins
• Hypervisor admins
• IT managers
• stakeholders (department leads, managers, directors) 
• Identify customer initiatives
• Immediate needs and goals
• Mid/long term needs and goals
• Urgent issues 
• Identify SharePoint Farms
• Number of farms and their network and physical locations
• Production / staging / development?
• Type / usage / role (content, collaboration, records management, MySites, Legal, etc) 
• Check Central Administration and become familiar with the farm's:
• Health Report
• Search status
• Web applications and their configuration
• Internal / external facing
• Site collections per web application
• Search Content Sources
• Search Crawl Schedule
• Crawl account
• Managed accounts
• Failed Job History
• Service Applications and status
• Services on Server and status
• User Profile configuration, sync method: AD Import?
• Patch status
• Authentication methods (Windows: NTLM, Kerberos, Basic. Anonymous; Forms: LDAP, SQL Server, Custom; SAML)
• Authentication Modes (Classic, Claims-based)
• Installed farm solutions and status 
• Check Site Collections and become familiar with:
• Navigation
• Installed site solutions
• Site collection features listing and activation status
• Style method: themes, master page, direct CSS
• Remote into each farm server and become familiar with that server's:
• Event logs
• Memory installed
• CPU
• Memory and CPU usage
• NICS: one, two (internal, external)
• Installed farm systems and their versions (Windows, SP, SQL Server, IIS, AppFabric, Workflow, OWA, PHA, etc)
• Uses database alias? 
• Check each server VM (if virtualized) configuration settings:
• Virtualization host type: VMWare, HyperV
• Memory allocation start, max, dynamic/static
• Distributed cache/Search
• CPU virtual:physical cores: 2:1, 1:1, etc? Oversubscribed? 1:1 best
• Hyperthreading enabled
• NUMA?
• Virtual LAN for farm server-to-server?
• Failover clustering?
• Check SQL Server
• AlwaysOn configuration
• List databases, sizes, locations, recovery type (simple, - list logons, their mapping and roles
• Dedicated to farm?