Consolidate multiple SharePoint 2010 Farms including Shared Services Farm into one farm

Question

In an existing environment there are seven farms where one is a shared services farm for search, managed metadata and user profiles. The reason for six different SharePoint 2010 farms is organizational and political, which is not a scope in this question. These different farms are small, containing one or two web applications with a total storage of less than 200 GB per web application/site collection. There is one web application with one site collection of 350 GB and the total amount of storage is 2.2 TB.

We’re considering to consolidate all these different farms into one single farm to use only half of the Web Front End Servers and Application Servers and use an existing SQL Server Cluster environment which three of the farms already use. There will also be a substantial reduction of SharePoint Server licenses if we perform this task as planned.

All web applications/site collections have custom solutions and individual settings, but there are no third party solutions anywhere. There is, however, a Content Type Hub in one of the farms.

Would you recommend that we continue with this plan, or what would you say could stop us in our plans?

Answer 1

From an administrative and cost savings perspective, this makes total sense. I'd try make sure that each of the old farms has their own host name to give them the feeling nothing has changed regardless of where the farm and content resides.

The biggest barrier that you said is really the organizational and political aspect. It is technically possibly to merge these farms into one, but the driving interoffice politics might be the biggest hurdle to overcome. I have no doubt you and your team have the technical skills to consolidate the infrastructure, but if you don't have someone spearheading the effort, it might not be as successful as it could be.