This document discusses preparing for a SharePoint 2010 deployment. It recommends learning as much as possible about SharePoint 2010 through online training and trial versions. The environment should be prepared by setting up an evaluation environment, installing and testing SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010, and practicing upgrades. Hardware requirements have increased, so the environment will need more servers to support high availability, scalability, and performance. Database performance is critical, so SQL Server should be configured for best practices and dedicated storage allocated. New tools like Deployment Advisor can help assess system health and identify issues.
3. About Mike Product Manager at Quest Web Parts Deployment Advisor Focus on availability, scalability, and manageability of SharePoint Previously at Microsoft BPOS (Dedicated and helped design Standard) Worked on SharePoint guidance as SharePoint CAT virtual team member Center of Excellence Helped teach the MCM U.S. Army Computers, Finance, Accounting, and Armor (M1A2)
4. Problems in SharePoint 2007 Maintenance Customization Tracking & improving performance Managing & Monitoring Change Governance Managing Systems Patching Lack of knowledge Storage Usage & Growth Cross-farm management Managing Capacity Security Guaranteeing Availability Lack of insight
5. Problems in SharePoint 2010 Maintenance Customization Tracking & improving performance Managing & Monitoring Change Governance Managing Systems Patching Lack of knowledge Storage Usage & Growth Cross-farm management Managing Capacity Security Guaranteeing Availability Lack of insight
7. What’s Going On? Complexity New capabilities and terminology Changes to familiar services Brand new services Additional databases (was 7: now 19) Concurrency Clients more connected Ajax polling Offline Expectation Users are more sophisticated Accountability More ways than ever to catch you
11. Prepare Yourself and Your Team Setup an evaluation environment Install and play with SP2010 http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/try-it/Pages/Trial.aspx Install and play with Office 2010 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ee390818.aspx Learn LearnLearn! http://blogs.msdn.com/arpans/archive/2009/12/02/sharepoint-2010-training.aspx Practice your upgrade
20. SharePoint & Virtualization Virtual is never as good as physical (sharing) Some virtualization features don’t work well E.g. Resource pool allocation aka overcommit Virtualization introduces some artificial limitations to scaling up Processor limitations per machine Ability to leverage memory Sharing across bottlenecks (hw bus, NIC) Some roles work better with virtualization than others…
24. Database Performance is Paramount! SQL Health = SharePoint Health! Sub-optimal SQL performance will radiate to other components in the farm
25. Configure SQL to conform w/ best practices Configure Memory Min & Max values = Total memory – 2GB for OS overhead Configure Temp DB Allocate ¼, ½, or 1 data file per processor core Pregrow databases & never autogrow Align partitions 64KB or 256KB Use 64KB or larger multiple for RAID stripe size Dedicate storage for SQL Separate storage for different workloads Use RAID 10
30. Best Practices – SQL Disk IO Allocate separate and dedicated disks with the following specifications: * Raid 1 or variants (0+1, 1+0) ** Depends on type and amount of content being indexed *** 2000 IOPS minimum. Plan on 1500 IOPS per simultaneous crawl. (e.g. 3 crawls = 4500 IOPS) **** Use Raid 5 when redundancy needs are met with replication
34. What is Deployment Advisor? A tool created specifically to instill confidence in SharePoint, its administrators, their managers, and ultimately end users.
36. Usage Scenarios Discover layouts folder customizations Compare web.config files across web applications and servers Compare service settings across farms Determine upgrade readiness across farms Assess health of services, servers, databases, and farms Discover best practice and capacity boundary violations Export and print anything you see – overviews, summaries, risks.
42. Summary 2010 is infinitely better than 2007 Higher level problems still exist just as they did in 2007 Our jobs as Administrators are getting harder due to: Complexity Concurrence Expectations Accountability Prepare for the unknown by: Learning as much as you can Practicing Excess hardware capacity (physical and virtual) Deploy SQL right Allocate proper storage
Related to budget is management. Handling more servers simply requires more people. I’ve never seen a shop happily managing lots of servers and it’s not the OS’s fault. Servers, regardless of make, are not perfectly reliable. Add to that routine maintenance such as patching, defragmentation, backup, and restore, and you can quickly see how the overhead starts adding up. Case in point, MSIT. Even with nearly 30 operations people and outsourcing agreements for SQL, storage, and base hardware/OS support, the 400 something servers keep those folks very busy. Make sure the managing team has enough people to manage the additional servers or can hire more as needed. And don’t forget about the psychology of server administration. There are few tools that allow you manage multiple servers from one place. Each server instance represents a standalone management challenge that burdens the psyche of the administrator until he or she becomes overburdened and unhappy. While scaling up has its management challenges as well, removing the burden of the extra hardware, OS, and multiple points of administration makes scaling up attractive in this respect.