This configuration can deliver optimal performance for environments requiring either scalable servers
for use with Hyper-V virtualization to create an HA environment for the SharePoint 2010 farm or
scalable performance for a SharePoint 2010 farm with a simplified topology. This configuration is
rated at approximately 250 to 450 simultaneous users and can deliver between 20K and 25K IOPS
in storage performance. Even higher performance is offered by adding disk enclosures or disk drives,
such as Solid State disks (SSDs) and Nearline (NL) disks. More information about HP 3PAR storage
system performance can be found in the “For more information” section at the end of the paper
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SharePoint 2010 recommended Configurations for Mid-Market
November 15, 2011 
0 Comments
Protection for Virtualized SharePoint 2010 Farms
July 15, 2011 0 Comments
This white paper describes the design, deployment, and validation of a comprehensive midsize Microsoft SharePoint 2010 solution. This solution is based on VMware vSphere 4.1 technologies for server virtualization and availability. EMC CLARiiON CX4-130 is used as the storage platform for virtual machine data, content and remote BLOB storage (RBS). Finally, EMC RecoverPoint, which is integrated with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM), ensures continuous availability of the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 farm.
Download Whitepaper: Protection for Virtualized SharePoint 2010 Farms
Download Whitepaper: Protection for Virtualized SharePoint 2010 Farms
Virtualize SharePoint Server on Hyper-V
July 13, 2011 0 Comments
How to virtualize SharePoint Server 2010/2007 in Hyper-V?
Microsoft Virtualization: Best Choice for SharePoint Server
Microsoft Virtualization technologies – Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center – provide SharePoint architects with a flexible toolset that can be used to reduce hardware and energy costs, increase the performance of SharePoint farms, and provide a level of design and management flexibility that is not possible with traditional physical deployment approaches.
Virtualizing the SharePoint 2010 Database-Tier
July 13, 2011 0 Comments
Over the last few months, I’ve had a number of conversations with customers regarding the virtualization of SQL Server for the database-tier of SharePoint Server 2010 deployments. Historically, administrators have been hesitant to virtualize SQL Server database servers out of concerns for performance. With advances in virtualization technology and the adoption of new IT standards, virtual deployments have become the new norm in many organizations.
Still, virtualization is not the right choice for every workload. The purpose of this blog is to highlight the key considerations that go into deciding whether to virtualize the SharePoint database-tier.
Support for Virtualization
The first thing to consider is the SQL Server support policy for virtualization. SQL Server 2005+ enjoys support on a wide range of virtualization platforms with two important limitations. First, mobility technologies, i.e. VMWare VMotion, are not supported with the exception of Hyper-V Live Migration which has received thorough testing with SQL Server. Second, virtualization snapshots are not supported on any platform, including Hyper-V.
Read More: Virtualizing the SharePoint 2010 Database-Tier
By: Bryan C Smith
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 on Cisco Unified Computing System
July 11, 2011 0 Comments
A Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Environment comprising of various servers which collectively hosts
the core applications and provide services, termed as SharePoint Farm is responsible for providing
various functions to its users. A three-tier architectural topology in which the SharePoint tiers (Web,
Application, and Database) are deployed using independent servers responsible for each tier is among
the most used SharePoint 2010 farm topology. To size each tier of a SharePoint farm demands detailed
study of the workload requirement and its usage patterns along with the performance capabilities of each
hardware component deployed in the system.
This paper illustrates performance of a medium SharePoint farm, built using Cisco UCS servers
implementing three tier architecture. A load generation framework to perform a load test was developed
by the SharePoint engineering team at Cisco, to measure the performance metrics while keeping the
much important response time less than 1 second. The paper shares the test results which provide
accurate guidance, better understanding of the performance impact of different SharePoint workloads,
assist our customers in sizing and designing the best farm architecture to support different workloads,
while recommending the best infrastructure elements for the optimal SharePoint implementation.
This study details information on how the recommended farm architecture could support 50000 users with
10% of total users concurrently working and show how to achieve sub second response time. Also,
highlights the performance benefits of new Cisco Servers used for this study.
Read More: Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 on Cisco Unified Computing System
SharePoint 2010 Virtualization Guidance and Recommendations
May 12, 2011 0 Comments
Source: SharePoint 2010 Virtualization Guidance
Why Virtualize SharePoint?
Virtualizing SharePoint and its server components can provide many business and technical benefits. With virtualization, you can consolidate hardware and ease server management and provisioning—helping to promote cost savings, business continuity, and agile management. Moreover, SharePoint virtualization is ideal for organizations that have more than one SharePoint farm, such as those with high availability production, testing, and development environments. The remainder of this section describes additional benefits of SharePoint virtualization in greater detail.
Hardware Consolidation
Hardware consolidation essentially allows you to run different SharePoint servers and various server components sharing the same hardware set. Hardware consolidation yields a variety of benefits:
Resource utilization and balancing: With SharePoint virtualization and the built-in enhancements of the Hyper-V 64-bit multiprocessor and multicore technology, you can run multiple workloads on different, isolated virtual machines—helping to use and balance resources more efficiently. Because you manage only a single physical server that runs isolated virtual machines, it is easier to provision and balance various resources, such as RAM and disk space, for different SharePoint server components.
Reduced costs for physical infrastructure, maintenance, power, and cooling: Server consolidation reduces server count, which, in turn, reduces the cost of SharePoint infrastructure and maintenance. Consequently, cooling needs and power consumption are also reduced. From the perspective of environmental sustainability, SharePoint virtualization can be a major contributor to the Green IT movement.
Less physical space: By virtualizing SharePoint farms, you can provide required capabilities with fewer servers, thereby freeing up space originally allotted for servers.
SharePoint 2010 virtual Architectures for Small-to-Medium Farms
SharePoint 2010 Virtual Architectures for Medium-to-Large Farms
HP Sizer for Microsoft SharePoint
May 10, 2011 0 Comments
Great tool for Building SharePoint 2010 Solution Architecture and SharePoint 2010 Storage Architecture
HP Sizer for Microsoft SharePoint is a complimentary planning resource that encapsulates knowledge gained from extensive performance characterization of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint 2010 in the HP Alliances Performance and Solutions labs, widespread collaboration between HP and Microsoft, and numerous SharePoint performance whitepapers produced by HP engineering. The Sizer offers a quick and consistent methodology for determining and comparing configurations, as well as detailed, customizable server and storage solutions complete with bill of materials and pricing.
HP Sizer for Microsoft SharePoint solicits data or uses built-in defaults to determine optimal configurations based on SharePoint deployment best practices. Selectable configurations include entry level, highly available, and application optimized solutions. A "what if" feature allows rapid comparison of the effects of workload changes, platform and storage technology selection, and provides role-based server configurations, capacity utilization, and estimated network traffic. Users can select a configuration and then customize their environment by adding or substituting components within best-practice guidelines.
The tool also addresses one of the most critical areas of SharePoint server design: performance and capacity planning for the storage subsystem. Its storage sizing and configuration capabilities offer detailed best-practice storage volume and RAID recommendations to support database and content storage needs using HP direct-attach storage, HP StorageWorks MSA or EVA Storage SAN solutions.
» Download HP Sizer for Microsoft SharePoint 2010
» Download HP Sizer for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Highly Available SharePoint 2010 Virtualization for Large Farm
May 10, 2011 0 Comments
Solution from HP
Source: http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA1-4068ENW.pdf
HP recommends this 4-server configuration for larger solutions where high-availability is a requirement, the expected user population is up to 1000 users (assuming an active user concurrency of typically 25-50%), and usage of various SharePoint Application services (for example Excel Services, PerformancePoint, etc.) is planned. The expected solution workload is mostly collaboration and portal activity, with some use of team sites and My Sites, but also includes extended use of the various new SharePoint 2010 application services (for example, Excel services, Office client services, and others). SharePoint 2010 has extended the possible topologies for the Search service by enabling more than one Index Search service to be run on separate servers. This feature can be used to provide redundancy for the service (high availability), or to divide the crawl sources across multiple services, thus improving overall crawl speed, and to apply differing crawl rules and frequencies to better match the business need regarding freshness of specific index data.
This configuration example utilizes two HP ProLiant DL585 G7 servers that are configured with four 12-core processors, 64GB of RAM, and eight internal SAS disk drives each, and are connected to an HP 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA4400) storage device to provide failover cluster support for 6 Hyper-V R2 virtual machines (VMs). Each VM is configured with 4 virtual CPUs, 8GBs of RAM, and a 40GB VHD container file that is hosted on a single 500GB LUN configured as a Cluster Shared Volume provided by the EVA4400 device. In this 6 VM example the WFE and Query roles, Index Service role and Application services role are each deployed on two VMs. In this case, it is to provide increased capacity, as the high-availability needs are already met by Hyper-V R2 running on an active/active failover cluster. Further, the solution is sized such that each physical server is running at no more that 50% of maximum recommended capacity. Thus should failover occur, the remaining server can support the total VM load and not impact performance.
SQL Server is installed into a separate active/passive cluster of an additional two HP ProLiant DL585 G7 servers, each have four 12-core processors, 64GB of RAM, and storage for the SQL databases is provided via the same EVA4400 SAN.
Highly Available SharePoint 2010 Virtualization for Medium Farm
May 10, 2011 1 Comment
Solution from HP
Source: http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA1-4068ENW.pdf
HP recommends this configuration for virtualized medium-sized solutions where high-availability is a requirement, and the expected user population is up to 500 users (assuming an active user concurrency of typically 25-50%). The expected solution workload is mostly collaboration and portal activity, with some use of team sites and My Sites. SharePoint 2010 has extended the possible topologies for the Search service by enabling more than one Index Search service to be run on separate servers. This feature can be used to provide redundancy for the service (high availability), or to divide the crawl sources across multiple services, thus improving overall crawl speed, and to apply differing crawl rules and frequencies to better match the business need regarding freshness of specific index data.
For approximately 500 users and above, the environment will need to be divided up into four physical servers, two running Hyper-V R2 VMs in a cluster, and two dedicated to a physical SQL Server failover cluster. In this example, two HP ProLiant DL580 G7 servers, each configured with four 8-core processors and 64GBs of RAM, will support the Web Front End/Query and Index services in an active/active failover cluster. This cluster will use a shared HP P2000 G3 MSA LFF array to provide a single Cluster Shared Volume for all the VHD (virtual hard disk) file containers. In this example the WFE and Query services are supported on two child partitions, which are configured to have four virtual CPUs (vCPUs), and 8GBs of RAM each. The Index Search service runs on two further child partitions, along with the Central Administration and other application services.
SQL Server is installed on a non-virtualized failover cluster consisting of two HP ProLiant DL580 G7 servers with four 8-core processors, configured with 64GBs of RAM each, eight internal SAS disk drives, and an HP P2000 G3 MSA SFF array. Two “Hot” RAID0+1 volumes of eight disks each and a single “Cold” RAID5 volume of eight disks are created to support SQL Server.
Highly Available SharePoint 2010 Virtualization for Small Farm
May 10, 2011 0 Comments
Solution from HP
Source: http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA1-4068ENW.pdf
HP recommends this 2-server solution for SMB customers who are looking to deploy solutions in a virtualized environment using Microsoft Hyper-V R2, and also wish to employ high-availability technologies to ensure continuity of service. The expected user population is up to 150 users (assuming an active user concurrency of typically 30-50%).
It uses the same SharePoint service deployment topology as the “Medium-sized configuration (3-server solution)” physical server solution, but deploys the three roles onto three virtual machines (VMs) rather than three physical servers. The two servers are formed into an active/active failover cluster and then run Hyper-V R2 to virtualize the environment. The three roles are then deployed onto three VMs across the cluster, each VM being configured with 4 virtual CPUs (cores) and appropriate memory.
The total server memory has been sized to support the VMs and any Hypervisor and OS overhead. Nominally the SharePoint WFE and Query Search roles would run on Server “A”; and the Index Search and SQL roles on Server “B”. However should a server fail for some reason, the solution has been sized such that the remaining active server can support the full required load and role VMs will automatically fail-over to the running server. Storage utilizes an HP P2000 G3 MSA to provide the required SAN technology to support the failover cluster. An AMD-based solution is shown.
Enhanced Management of Virtualized Microsoft Environments
May 8, 2011 1 Comment
New EMC tools leverage familiar Microsoft and EMC storage management tools and consoles to help customers get an end-to-end view of the management of virtualized Microsoft environments. These new EMC technologies help customers identify bottlenecks and proactively manage them. Customers can also rapidly deploy large scale virtualized environments that previously required multiple IT actions and resources. The advantages of these new tools and technologies include:
- Simplified storage provisioning and automatic discovery of physical and virtualized Microsoft servers and SharePoint environments with EMC Storage Integrator.
- Elimination of manual scripting required for complete protection and recovery for applications such as Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint with EMC Replication Manager and EMC VNXe unified storage systems for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB).
- New EMC Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) pack for Microsoft System Center provides proactive management to protect customers from running out of storage capacity in their Microsoft virtualized environment. Through integration with Microsoft System Center, administrators are alerted when storage capacity is low and presented an option to move virtual machines to a storage volume with more capacity to prevent an unscheduled outage of the virtual machines.
- Microsoft System Center Operations Manager includes a reporting tool for monitoring EMC storage platforms system health and diagnostics through the Microsoft management dashboards. This provides a single, integrated view of an EMC SAN infrastructure.
Virtualized SharePoint 2010 Environment by using VMware vSphere
March 16, 2011 0 Comments
Virtualized SharePoint 2010 Environment by using VMware vSphere and EMC CLARiiON CX4-120 with EMC efficient storage technology.
The SharePoint 2010 farm with high availability is protected locally with Replication Manager intergrating with EMC SnapView snap technology and remotely with RecoverPoint/SE CRP controlled by VMware vCenter SRM
Read Complete Article:
SharePoint Business Continuity Solutions
March 12, 2011 0 Comments
MC’s Proven Solutions team continues to amaze me with the quality of work they are producing including building out some challenging scenarios that are meant to replicate a customer’s environment. By doing this they can test the scenario, understand the expected results and document EMC’s recommendations for properly deploying the configuration.
Last month the team produced a solution highlighting how to virtualize Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007 using Hyper-V R2 and using EMC’s RecoverPoint Cluster Enabler technology for high availability as well as local and remote data protection.
Hight Availibility SharePoint Solution
For more information be sure to check out the whitepaper and stay tuned for more exciting Proven Solutions using Hyper-V from our team of experts!
Read More: http://vwin.typepad.com/blog/2010/06/virtualizing-sharepoint-server-2007.html
NEW Hyper-V SharePoint Solutions on EMC VNX
March 12, 2011 0 Comments
NEW Hyper-V SharePoint Solutions on EMC VNX
A few weeks ago I wrote about the EMC VNXe, a new storage array platform targeted at the Small & Medium Business (SMB) market. Another one of the many products announced at the same time is the EMC VNX, the bigger brother to the VNXe. The VNX is EMC’s latest generation of the mid-tier array providing five 9 availability and an impressive list of features including data compression, FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) VP storage tiering, FAST cache and data protection. The VNX is a truly unified array with support for Fibre Channel, iSCSI and NAS protocols and support for SAS harddrives as well as Enterprise Fast Drives (EFDs) for workloads that need instantaneous response times. Oh yeah and the new architecture is 3x faster while being offered at an affordable price point.
EMC recently released several new whitepapers testing Microsoft solutions virtualized with Hyper-V on the EMC VNX array. This includes a Hyper-V VNXe Deployment Guide, a Hyper-V with SQL Server performance guide and a Hyper-V with Sharepoint 2010 and Metaloigix StoragePoint Reference Architecture Whitepaper. This blog post will be the first in a series spread over the next several weeks highlighting some of these whitepapers as well as others as they become available.
The Sharepoint document entitled Externalizing Large SharePoint 2010 Objects with EMC VNX Series and MetaLogix StoragePoint takes a look at using the EMC VNX array to hold active SharePoint data as well as BLOB storage for aged data. With many large SharePoint farms, a large portion of data is stored as unstructured binary data streams also known as BLOBs. Considering SharePoint relies on SQL Server and SQL Server is not the most efficient option for storing BLOB data (SQL is more efficient at storing structured relational data), taking this data out of SQL Server and storing it on another portion of the array has many benefits. Some of these benefits include freeing up space on tier 1 storage drives and storing this aged data on a more cost effective solution using storage tiering. Additional benefits to this method includes applying technologies like compression, encryption and snapshot based backups of this data for better space utilization, increased security and better data protection.
While understanding how to configure a BLOB storage solution is addressed, this Reference Architecture also covers how to design the VNX storage for SharePoint to ensure performance and space requirements are also met for the most recent and frequently accessed data. Here is an image showing the overall infrastructure used in the solution:
- Adding Custom Attributes to Active Directory user profile
- Removing the left-hand navigation in SharePoint 2010
- SharePoint 2010 Navigation, Flyouts menus
- InfoPath 2010 Advanced Form Options
- Adding Flash to SharePoint 2010
