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Implementing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

November 5, 2012 by Aryan Nava 0 Comments


Implementing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 on Dell 12th -Generation
Blade Servers and VMware vSphere 5.0

A reference architecture and performance study for a SharePoint Server 2010 farm up to 10,000 concurrent users

This white paper includes results of a comprehensive study and describes how a partially-virtualized
SharePoint farm, built using Dell PowerEdge™ blade servers, Dell Compellent™ Series 40 Storage Center
storage arrays with Fibre Channel controllers, and VMware vSphere 5.0 performed under load testing.
The key findings from this study are:

• The recommended farm architecture was able to support more than 100,000 users with 10
percent concurrency.

• The farm architecture used in this study had an average farm response time of 69ms or 0.069
seconds at the maximum supported, which was well below the one-second response time
target.

• The Dell Compellent storage backend was capable of supporting a 2TB SharePoint content
database with an average disk response time of 2ms and ~1454 average disk transfers per
second.


http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/business/solutions/whitepapers/en/Documents/implementing-server-2010-blades-vmware-vsphere.pdf

SharePoint 2010 Deployment, SharePoint Virtualizaiton

Virtualize SharePoint Server

July 13, 2011 by Aryan Nava 0 Comments


Where do I download white papers about SharePoint Virtualization?  You can download all the white papers from Microsoft site for SharePoint Virtualization

  • SharePoint 2010 Virtualization Guidance and Recommendations
  • Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies
  • Deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 on the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform Reference Architecture Guide
  • Virtualizing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
  • Read the ESG Lab Report on Hyper-V
  • Microsoft IT Leverages its Compute Service to Virtualize SharePoint 2010
    • SharePoint Virtualizaiton

    Virtualize SharePoint Server on Hyper-V

    July 13, 2011 by Aryan Nava 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.

    Virtualize SharePoint Server on Hyper-V

    SharePoint High availability, SharePoint Virtualizaiton

    SharePoint 2010 Virtualization Guidance and Recommendations

    May 12, 2011 by Aryan Nava 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 Small-to-Medium Farms

     

    SharePoint 2010 Virtual Architectures for Medium-to-Large Farms

     

    image

    Source: SharePoint 2010 Virtualization Guidance

    SharePoint 2010 Virtualization, SharePoint High availability, SharePoint Virtualizaiton
    ,

    HP Sizer for Microsoft SharePoint

    May 10, 2011 by Aryan Nava 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.


    HP Sizer for SharePoint 2010
    image
    Application Services screen : SharePoint 2010 Sizer

     

    Usage Characteristics : SharePoint 2010 Sizer

    Building SharePoint 2010 Solution Architecture
    Building SharePoint 2010 Storage Architecture


    » Download HP Sizer for Microsoft SharePoint 2010


    » Download HP Sizer for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

    HP Servers, SharePoint 2010 Storage, SharePoint 2010 Virtualization, SharePoint High availability, SharePoint Virtualizaiton, Storage Management, Storage Optimization

    Highly Available SharePoint 2010 Virtualization for Large Farm

    May 10, 2011 by Aryan Nava 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 Large Farm

    HP Servers, SharePoint 2010 Virtualization, SharePoint High availability, SharePoint Virtualizaiton, Storage Management

    Highly Available SharePoint 2010 Virtualization for Medium Farm

    May 10, 2011 by Aryan Nava 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 Medium Farm

    HP Servers, SharePoint 2010 Virtualization, SharePoint High availability, SharePoint Virtualizaiton, Storage Management

    Enhanced Management of Virtualized Microsoft Environments

    May 8, 2011 by Aryan Nava 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.

      Read More: Enhanced Management for Virtualized SharePoint

    SharePoint 2010 Storage, SharePoint High availability, SharePoint Virtualizaiton
    ,

    SharePoint Virtualization White Papers

    May 6, 2011 by Aryan Nava 0 Comments


     

    SharePoint Virtualizaiton

    Deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 on the Hitachi Virtual Storage

    May 6, 2011 by Aryan Nava 0 Comments



    http://www.hds.com/assets/pdf/deploying-microsoft-sharepoint-server-2010-hitachi-vsp.pdf

    This document describes a tested reference architecture that provides high availability and simplified storage administration for enterprise SharePoint deployments. It is written for storage administrators, SQL administrators and SharePoint administrators. Readers need to be familiar with general storage and SharePoint implementation concepts.

    Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 on the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform

    High-level view of the infrastructure used to host the SharePoint environment

    Read More:
    http://www.hds.com/assets/pdf/deploying-microsoft-sharepoint-server-2010-hitachi-vsp.pdf

    SharePoint Virtualizaiton

    Virtualizing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

    May 6, 2011 by Aryan Nava 0 Comments


    Virtualizing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Dynamics 

    By virtualizing workloads with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 R2 Hyper-V™ technology on IBM® System x3650 M3, businesses can make the best use of server hardware investments by consolidating multiple servers as separate virtual machines running on a single
    physical machine.

    A two-node Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster comprised of two IBM System x3650 M3 enterprise servers, each configured with two 6-core Intel® Xeon® processor x5600 series and 64 GB of memory,offers both high availability and high performance. This two-node
    cluster can host virtual machines supporting 5,000 users on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and 1,000 users on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Contents

    Read More: Virtualizing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM

    SharePoint Virtualizaiton

    SharePoint Roles & Virtualization Considerations

    May 6, 2011 by Aryan Nava 0 Comments


     

    SharePoint Roles & Virtualization Considerations

    SharePoint Virtualizaiton

    Virtualizing SharePoint Complete Guide

    March 12, 2011 by Aryan Nava 0 Comments


    SharePoint Virtualizaiton

    Virtualizing SharePoint Database Role

    March 12, 2011 by Aryan Nava 0 Comments


    Virtualizing the database role

    The database role’s responsibility is store, maintain and return data to the other roles in the farm. This role has the highest amount of disk IO activity and can often have very high memory and processor requirements. Virtualization of SQL Server 2005 and 2008 is supported. Depending on your environment’s requirements will determine whether you choos physical or virtual deployment options.

    The argument for physical:

    • SQL Server is already a consolidation layer and will host 7-10 SharePoint databases at a minimum. Recommended content database size is 100 GIG. Some enterprise deployments have 100′s of content databases over multiple SQL instances.
    • Longer response times impacts ALL downstream roles in a SharePoint farm: Virtualization introduces some latency downstream in the application and UI server roles of a MOSS farm. If every SQL request takes longer that impact might be magnified in the application and UI layers, especially considering that multiple roundtrips occur frequently to complete a single transaction.
    • It will experience heavy CPU, Memory, Disk I/O, and NIC usage. It is importanty to understand that virtualization by itself adds some resource requirements to the system. Which need to be taken into account. Secondly the resource requirements of the workload need to fit into a virtual machine in order to make sense in a virtual environment. If either the available hardware is not able to support the load of multiple virtual machines or the smallest unit of a workload does not fit into the envelope of a VM then physical deployment is the right thing to do. In the end, the important thing here is that this role needs to perform independent of  if it is running in a VM or physical.
    • Possible ramifications to SharePoint: If the overall performance evaluation or virtual machines are not adequately spec’ced, this might result in slower response times for the end user and, in the background processes, slower performance of long running background operations which could increase operation time outs. This would be similar to running on physical hardware with insufficient capacity.

    If you decide to virtualize the database layer:

    • Assess first using Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (www.microsoft.com/map)
    • Implement SQL Aliases in your SharePoint farm
    • Assign as much RAM as needed and CPU as possible
    • Offload the Disk I/O from the virtual machines and prefer pass through or fixed size disks over dynamically expanding disks.
    • Split SQL cluster over two physical hosts for minimum data layer availability. (hardware redundancy and load distribution)
    • Check the SQL CAT whitepaper on virtualizing SQL on Hyper-V:
      http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/9/4/d948f981-926e-40fa-a026-5bfcf076d9b9/SQL2008inHyperV2008.docx
    • SQL Clustering – Do not virtualize the passive node of a SQL cluster: It defeats the reason you clustered in the first place, which is high availability of your databases. Either virtualize the entire database layer or keep all physical! You cannot virtualize part of a SQL cluster. You can, but virtualizing the passive node of the active-passive SQL Server cluster is not recommended. Why? Typically you lose about 15-25% percent in performance using virtualized database hardware and over time portal usage will grow resulting in greater database load requirements. Over time your physical host will get squeezed by the other virtual slices until the point when the virtual passive node may not handle physical node’s load.  It defeats the reason you clustered in the first place.
    • SQL Clustering of virtual database nodes is supported.UPDATE: The guidance has now been updated to support guest clustering provided the virtualization technologies are certified using the SVVP program. See
      http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956893
       (Thanks James Daniel)
    SharePoint Virtualizaiton

    Virtualizing SharePoint Index Role

    March 12, 2011 by Aryan Nava 0 Comments


    Virtualizing the index role

    The index role’s responsibility is to maintain an up-to-date index by crawling the index corpus using the configured incremental and full crawl schedules. It then needs to propagate the index to all the query servers. The Index server role in a SharePoint farm is often times the most memory intensive role, making it a less ideal candidate for virtualization if SharePoint already consumes all the memory the physical server has available. This by no means rules it out as a candidate to be virtualized, it simply reduces the advantages that can be gained by virtualizing the server, as more of the host’s resources will need to be dedicated to the task.

    To increase index role suitability for virtualization might entail increasing memory the physical host server has available, therefore taking advantage of the consolidation effects with other workloads. Alternatively the virtualized index server could be moved to a larger system to host it side by side with other workloads of the SharePoint farm. In the end this really depends on the available infrastructure as well as the deployment goals of the SharePoint farm.

    • Crawling recommendation: Use index server to be dedicated crawl server to avoid network hop.
    • For best performance, use fastest disk infrastructure possible: Prefer dedicated physical volumes on underlying SAN infrastructure using the “pass through” disk feature of Hyper V or fixed disk VHD on that LUN over dynamically expanding virtual hard disks.
    • Physical or Virtual Machine?: If the environment is small, is a test or dev environment, or does not crawl significant amounts of content, it is perfectly viable to use virtual disk files for the Index role. For very large production SharePoint farms, or for farms that are crawling a significant amount of content, the memory requirements and disk IO activity may prompt SharePoint architects to install the index role on a physical server.

      Source:
      http://blogs.msdn.com/b/uksharepoint/archive/2009/03/08/virtualizing-sharepoint-series-recommendations-for-each-server-role-in-the-virtualized-sharepoint-environment.aspx

    SharePoint Virtualizaiton
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