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DESIGN GUIDE

EMC VSPEX FOR VIRTUALIZED MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT 2013 Enabled by EMC Next-Generation VNX and EMC Backup

EMC VSPEX

Abstract

This Design Guide describes how to design virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 resources on the appropriate EMC® VSPEX® Proven Infrastructure for Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere enabled by EMC VNXe® or EMC Next-Generation VNX® and EMC backup. This Design Guide also illustrates how to size SharePoint 2013 using the VSPEX Sizing Tool, allocate resources following best practices, and use all the benefits that VSPEX offers.

November 2013

EMC VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Enabled by EMC Next-Generation VNX and EMC Backup Design Guide

Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA.

Published November 2013.

EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.

The information in this publication is provided as is. EMC Corporation makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.

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Contents

EMC VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Enabled by EMC Next-Generation VNX and EMC Backup

Design Guide

Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction 9 Purpose of this guide ................................................................................................ 10 Business value ......................................................................................................... 10 Scope ....................................................................................................................... 11 Audience .................................................................................................................. 11 Terminology.............................................................................................................. 12

Chapter 2 Before You Start 15 Deployment workflow ............................................................................................... 16 Essential reading ...................................................................................................... 16

VSPEX Solution Overviews ................................................................................... 16 VSPEX Implementation Guides............................................................................. 17 VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides ..................................................................... 17 VSPEX with EMC backup and recovery guide ........................................................ 17 Best Practices guides ........................................................................................... 17

Chapter 3 Solution Overview 19 Overview .................................................................................................................. 20 Solution architecture ................................................................................................ 20 Key components ....................................................................................................... 21

Introduction ......................................................................................................... 21 Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013........................................................................ 22 Microsoft SQL Server 2012 .................................................................................. 23 EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructures ....................................................................... 24 EMC Next-Generation VNX .................................................................................... 26 EMC VNXe ............................................................................................................ 30 EMC backup and recovery solutions ..................................................................... 31 VMware vSphere 5.1 ............................................................................................ 31 Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V ...................................................... 32 EMC XtremSW Cache ............................................................................................ 32 EMC PowerPath/VE .............................................................................................. 32

Chapter 4 Choosing a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure 33 Overview .................................................................................................................. 34 Step 1: Evaluate the customer use case.................................................................... 34

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Contents


Overview .............................................................................................................. 34 VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet ........................... 34

Step 2: Design the application architecture .............................................................. 37 Overview .............................................................................................................. 37 VSPEX Sizing Tool ................................................................................................ 37

Step 3: Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure ............................................... 41 Overview .............................................................................................................. 41 Considerations .................................................................................................... 41 Examples ............................................................................................................. 42

Chapter 5 Solution Design Considerations and Best Practices 49 Overview .................................................................................................................. 50 Network design considerations ................................................................................ 50

Overview .............................................................................................................. 50 Network design best practices ............................................................................. 50

Storage layouts and design considerations .............................................................. 52 Overview .............................................................................................................. 52 Storage design best practices .............................................................................. 54 Storage layout examples...................................................................................... 60

Virtualization design considerations ........................................................................ 64 Overview .............................................................................................................. 64 Virtualization design best practices ..................................................................... 64

Application design considerations ........................................................................... 66 Overview .............................................................................................................. 66 Application design best practices ........................................................................ 66

Backup and recovery design considerations ............................................................. 69

Chapter 6 Solution Verification Methodologies 71 Overview .................................................................................................................. 72 Baseline hardware verification methodology ............................................................ 72 Application verification methodology ....................................................................... 72

Overview .............................................................................................................. 72 Defining the test scenarios .................................................................................. 73 Understanding key metrics .................................................................................. 74 Creating the test environment .............................................................................. 75 Populating the database ...................................................................................... 75 Running tests, analyzing results, and optimization .............................................. 76

Backup and recovery verification methodology ......................................................... 77 Test tools.................................................................................................................. 77

Sample tool to create large number of random documents .................................. 77

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Design Guide

Sample tool to load documents into SharePoint .................................................. 77 Sample code for SharePoint performance testing................................................. 77

Chapter 7 Reference Documentation 79 EMC documentation ................................................................................................. 80 Other documentation ............................................................................................... 80 Links ........................................................................................................................ 81

Microsoft TechNet ................................................................................................ 81 MSDN Library ....................................................................................................... 81

Appendix A Qualification Worksheet 83 VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet ................................ 84

Appendix B SharePoint Server 2013 Concepts 87 SharePoint Server 2013 fundamentals ..................................................................... 88 SharePoint Server 2013 search service ..................................................................... 89

Appendix C VSPEX Sizing Tool for Virtualized SharePoint 91 RPS calculation methodology ................................................................................... 92 Estimating content database size ............................................................................. 92

Appendix D High-level SharePoint Server 2013 Sizing Logic and Methodology 95

Overview .................................................................................................................. 96 SharePoint topology and compute resource sizing ................................................... 97

SharePoint Server 2013 web server sizing ........................................................... 97 Application server sizing ...................................................................................... 99 Database server sizing ....................................................................................... 100

Storage layout sizing for SharePoint Server 2013 ................................................... 101 SharePoint Server 2013 content database pool sizing ....................................... 102 SharePoint 2013 services pool sizing ................................................................ 105 MySite pool sizing ............................................................................................. 107 VSPEX private cloud pool sizing ......................................................................... 107

Selecting the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure ...................................................... 108

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Figures Figure 1. Architecture of the validated infrastructure .......................................... 21 Figure 2. SharePoint Server 2013 topology ........................................................ 24 Figure 3. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure ................................................................ 25 Figure 4. Next-Generation VNX with multicore optimization................................ 27 Figure 5. Active/active processors increase performance, resiliency, and

efficiency ............................................................................................. 28 Figure 6. Unisphere Management Suite ............................................................. 29 Figure 7. Required resources example: VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for small

SharePoint 2013 farm ......................................................................... 45 Figure 8. Required resources example: VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for medium

SharePoint farm................................................................................... 48 Figure 9. SharePoint 2013 storage elements on a VMware vSphere 5.1 platform52 Figure 10. SharePoint 2013 storage elements on Hyper-V platform ...................... 54 Figure 11. Storage layout example: SharePoint 2013 small farm for the VNXe series61 Figure 12. Storage layout example: SharePoint 2013 medium farm for VNX series

without FAST VP ................................................................................... 62 Figure 13. Storage layout example: SharePoint 2013 medium farm for VNX with

FAST VP ............................................................................................... 63 Figure 14. Printable qualification worksheet ........................................................ 85 Figure 15. SharePoint Server 2013 content structure ........................................... 89 Figure 16. Test result of relationship of active user number and host IOPS for

search intensive Publishing Portal ..................................................... 102 Figure 17. Test result of relationship of active user number and host IOPS for

search intensive Document Management Portal ................................ 103

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Contents


Design Guide

Tables Table 1. Terminology......................................................................................... 12 Table 2. VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint Server 2013: Deployment workflow .. 16 Table 3. Reference virtual machine: Characteristics .......................................... 26 Table 4. VNXe software suites ........................................................................... 30 Table 5. VNXe software packs ........................................................................... 31 Table 6. VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013: Design process ....................... 34 Table 7. VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet

guidelines ........................................................................................... 35 Table 8. VSPEX Sizing Tool output ..................................................................... 38 Table 9. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure: Selection steps ...................................... 41 Table 10. Example qualification worksheet: Small SharePoint farm .................... 42 Table 11. Example of required resources: Small SharePoint farm ........................ 43 Table 12. Example of SharePoint farm details in VSPEX Sizing Tool ..................... 44 Table 13. Example of performance key metrics: Small SharePoint farm ............... 44 Table 14. Example VSPEX qualification worksheet: Medium SharePoint farm...... 45 Table 15. Example of required resources: Medium SharePoint farm .................... 46 Table 16. Example summary: Medium SharePoint farm in VSPEX Sizing Tool ...... 47 Table 17. Example performance key metrics: Medium SharePoint farm ............... 47 Table 18. SharePoint related storage pools name and the purpose ..................... 53 Table 19. Example I/O pattern of the index temporary location in SharePoint

Server 2013 ......................................................................................... 55 Table 20. Disk type and RAID type for storage pool after FAST VP is enabled ....... 59 Table 21. Recommended number of vCPUs for the application server ................. 64 Table 22. Recommended number of vCPUs for SQL Server .................................. 65 Table 23. Recommended RAM for SQL Server ...................................................... 65 Table 24. Example I/O pattern of the index temporary location in SharePoint

Server 2013 ......................................................................................... 68 Table 25. High-level steps for application verification ......................................... 72 Table 26. General operations .............................................................................. 73 Table 27. Mixed workloads ................................................................................. 74 Table 28. VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet ........... 84 Table 29. SharePoint Server 2013 fundamental concepts ................................... 88 Table 30. SharePoint search service concepts .................................................... 89 Table 31. Formula to estimate content database size .......................................... 93 Table 32. High-level steps for SharePoint farm sizing .......................................... 96 Table 33. Sizing the web server by active user number ....................................... 97 Table 34. Web server compute resource assignment........................................... 98 Table 35. Sizing application servers for a normal farm ........................................ 99

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Contents


Table 36. Sizing application servers for a heavily used farm ............................... 99 Table 37. Application server compute resource assignment .............................. 100 Table 38. SQL Server vCPU resource sizing for SharePoint Server 2013 ............. 101 Table 39. SQL Server memory resource sizing for SharePoint Server 2013 ........ 101 Table 40. Example user input for sizing the content database pool ................... 104 Table 41. Size the application server for non-intensive search farm .................. 106 Table 42. Size the application server for intensive search farm ......................... 106 Table 43. RAID configuration for the MySite pool .............................................. 107 Table 44. VSPEX storage model support matrix ................................................. 109 Table 45. Storage system support matrix .......................................................... 110

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Chapter 1: Introduction


Design Guide

Chapter 1 Introduction

This chapter presents the following topics:

Purpose of this guide ............................................................................................... 10

Business value ......................................................................................................... 10

Scope ....................................................................................................................... 11

Audience .................................................................................................................. 11

Terminology ............................................................................................................. 12

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Purpose of this guide

EMC® VSPEX® Proven Infrastructures are optimized for virtualizing business critical applications. VSPEX gives customers the ability to plan and design the virtual assets required to support Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 in a virtualized environment on a VSPEX private cloud infrastructure.

The VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 architecture provides customers with a validated system, capable of hosting a virtualized SharePoint solution at a consistent performance level. This solution runs on a VMware vSphere or Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization layer, backed by the highly available EMC VNX® family, which provides the storage.

All VSPEX solutions are sized and tested with EMC backup and recovery products. EMC Avamar® and EMC Data Domain® enable complete infrastructure, application, and email backup and recovery, including granular email recovery capabilities. The compute and network components, while vendor-definable, are designed to be redundant and are sufficiently powerful to handle the processing and data needs of the virtual machine environment.

This Design Guide describes how to design a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint 2013 with best practices and how to select the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure with the EMC VSPEX Sizing Tool for sizing guidance.

Business value

The volume and diversity of content and the size of user data continues to grow year over year. Data is exploding, with a 50 times growth rate forecasted over the next 10 years. To realize the value in all of this data, businesses are turning to content management applications to promote collaboration and information sharing. For over ten years, SharePoint has been helping customers to develop portals for collaboration, to manage documents and records, search and share documents, and develop business process automation around their most valuable asset—their information.

As SharePoint has developed and continued to add new functionality and features, the challenges that businesses face in managing their data have also grown. Administering, auditing, protecting, managing, and delivering an optimal SharePoint infrastructure for a geographically distributed work force is a major challenge for most IT departments. Virtualization of physical servers and storage assets with VSPEX enables IT departments to be more dynamic and agile, and to keep pace with the ever-changing demands on the business.

VSPEX enables customers to accelerate their IT transformation with faster deployments and simplified management, backup, and storage provisioning. Customers can realize greater efficiency with higher application availability, increased storage utilization, and faster and leaner backups. In addition, VSPEX provides customers with choices when selecting a hypervisor, servers, and networks to address the requirements of their unique SharePoint 2013 environments.

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Design Guide

Scope

This Design Guide describes how to design a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint Server 2013 environments running on Microsoft Hyper-V or vSphere. The guide assumes that a VSPEX private cloud already exists in the customer’s environment.

The guide provides examples of deployments on both an EMC VNX and an EMC VNXe® storage array. Furthermore, it illustrates how to size SharePoint Server 2013 on the VSPEX infrastructures, allocate resources following best practices, and use all the benefits that VSPEX offers.

The EMC backup and recovery solutions for SharePoint data protection are described in a separate document EMC Backup and Recovery Options for VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Design and Implementation Guide.

Audience

This guide is intended for internal EMC personnel and qualified EMC VSPEX partners. The guide assumes that VSPEX partners who intend to deploy this VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution are:

• Qualified by Microsoft to sell and implement SharePoint solutions

• Certified in SharePoint Server 2013 with one or both of the following Microsoft certifications:

Core Solutions of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 (Exam: 331)

Advanced Solutions of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 (Exam: 332)

• Qualified by EMC to sell, install, and configure the EMC VNX family of storage systems

• Certified for selling VSPEX Proven Infrastructures

• Qualified to sell, install, and configure the network and server products required for VSPEX Proven Infrastructures

Partners who plan to deploy the solution must also have the necessary technical training and background to install and configure:

• VNX and VNXe

• vSphere or Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V as virtualization platforms

• Microsoft Windows Server 2012 operating systems (OS)

• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013

• EMC backup and recovery products, including Avamar and Data Domain

This guide provides external references where applicable. EMC recommends that partners implementing this solution are familiar with these documents. For details, refer to Essential reading and Chapter 7: Reference Documentation.

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Terminology

Table 1 lists the terminology used in this guide.

Table 1. Terminology

Term Definition

ACL Access control list

AD Active Directory

BLOB Binary large object

CSV Cluster-shared volume

DNS Domain Name System

DRS Distributed Resource Scheduler

eMLC Enterprise multilevel cell

FAST™ Cache A feature on EMC VNX series storage systems that enables you to use the lower response time and better IOPS of flash drives for specific applications

FAST VP Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools

IIS Internet Information Services

IOPS Input/output operations per second

iSCSI Internet Small Computer System Interface

LUN Logical unit number

MCx™ Multicore Code Path Optimization

MPP Multipath Plug-in

NIC Network interface card

NFS Network file system

NLB Microsoft Network Load Balancing

NL-SAS Near-line serial-attached SCSI

Overlay A VSPEX technology solution that adds optional functionality to a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure

RDM Raw device mapping

Reference virtual machine

Represents a unit of measure for a single virtual machine to quantify the compute resources in a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure

RPS Requests per second

RTM Release to manufacturing

SSD Solid state disk

tempdb tempdb refers to a system database used by Microsoft SQL Server as a temporary working area during processing.

TCO Total cost of ownership

VAAI VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration

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Design Guide

Term Definition

VDM Virtual Data Mover

VHDX Hyper-V virtual hard disk format

VMDK VMware virtual machine disk

VMFS VMware Virtual Machine File System

VSS Volume Shadow Copy Service

VSTS Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

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Chapter 2: Before You Start


Design Guide

Chapter 2 Before You Start


Deployment workflow .............................................................................................. 16

Essential reading ..................................................................................................... 16

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Deployment workflow

To design and implement your VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution, refer to the process flow in Table 21.

Table 2. VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint Server 2013: Deployment workflow

Step Action

1 Use the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet to collect user requirements. The one-page qualification worksheet is in 0.

2 Use the EMC VSPEX Sizing Tool to determine the recommended VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for your virtualized SharePoint solution, based on the user requirements collected in Step 1.

For more information about the Sizing Tool, refer to the EMC VSPEX Sizing Tool Portal.

Note: If the Sizing Tool is not available, you can manually size the application using the guidelines in Appendix D: High-level SharePoint Server 2013 Sizing Logic and Methodology.

3 Use this Design Guide to determine the final design for the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint Server 2013.

Note: Ensure that all application requirements are considered, not just the requirements for virtualized SharePoint.

4 Select and order the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. Refer to the appropriate VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guide in Essential reading for guidance.

5 Deploy and test your VSPEX solution. Refer to the appropriate VSPEX Implementation Guide in Essential reading for guidance.

Essential reading

EMC recommends that you read the following documents, available from the VSPEX space in the EMC Community Network or from EMC.com or the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure partner portal.

Refer to the following VSPEX Solution Overview documents:

• EMC VSPEX Server Virtualization for Midmarket Businesses

• EMC VSPEX Server Virtualization for Small and Medium Businesses

1 If your solution includes backup and recovery components, refer to EMC Backup and Recovery Options for VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Design and Implementation Guide for backup and recovery sizing and implementation guidelines.

VSPEX Solution Overviews

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Design Guide

Refer to the following VSPEX Implementation Guides:

• EMC VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 with Microsoft Hyper-V

• EMC VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 with VMware vSphere

Refer to the following VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides:

• EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: VMware vSphere 5.1 for up to 100 Virtual Machines

• EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: VMware vSphere 5.1 for up to 1,000 Virtual Machines

• EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V for up to 100 Virtual Machines

• EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V for up to 1,000 Virtual Machines

Refer to the following VSPEX with EMC backup and recovery guide:

• EMC Backup and Recovery Options for VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Design and Implementation Guide

Refer to the following Best Practices guides:

• EMC VNX Unified Best Practices for Performance

• EMC FAST VP for Unified Storage Systems

VSPEX Implementation Guides

VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides

VSPEX with EMC backup and recovery guide

Best Practices guides

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18

Chapter 3: Solution Overview


Design Guide

Chapter 3 Solution Overview


Overview .................................................................................................................. 20

Solution architecture ............................................................................................... 20

Key components ...................................................................................................... 21

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Overview

This chapter provides an overview of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 and the key technologies used in this solution. The solution described in this Design Guide includes the servers, storage, network components, and SharePoint components that focus on small and medium business private cloud environments.

The solution enables customers to quickly and consistently deploy and protect a virtualized SharePoint farm in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. The reference architecture in this solution will support the reference virtual machine resources, based on the sizing guidance for both the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure and the additional storage for the SharePoint application data.

The VNX and VNXe family storage arrays are multiprotocol platforms that can support the Internet Small Computer System (iSCSI), network file system (NFS), Common Internet File System (CIFS), Fibre Channel (FC), and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocols depending on a customer’s specific needs. This solution was validated using NFS and iSCSI for data storage.

This Design Guide can help customers to deploy a simple, effective, and flexible SharePoint solution on a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. The guidance applies to all VSPEX Proven Infrastructures, including VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.

This solution requires the presence of Active Directory (AD) and Domain Name System (DNS). The implementation of these services is beyond the scope of this guide, but the services are considered prerequisites for a successful deployment.

The backup and recovery solutions for SharePoint data protection are described in a separate document EMC Backup and Recovery Options for VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Design and Implementation Guide.

Solution architecture

Figure 1 shows the architecture that characterizes the validated infrastructure for a SharePoint 2013 overlay on a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

All SharePoint servers—web server, application server, and SQL Server—are deployed as virtual machines on VMware vSphere 5.1 or Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V. We2 used the VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint to determine the number of SharePoint server roles and the detailed compute resources for each role. We also used it to determine the recommended storage layout for SharePoint Server 2013, in addition to the VSPEX private cloud pool in the VNX or VNXe series.

2 In this guide, "we" and "our" refer to the EMC Solutions engineering team that validated the solution.

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Design Guide

Figure 1. Architecture of the validated infrastructure

Key components

This section provides an overview of the key technologies used in this solution:

• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013

• Microsoft SQL Server 2012

• EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructures

• EMC Next-Generation VNX

• EMC VNXe

• EMC backup and recovery solutions

• VMware vSphere 5.1

• Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V

Introduction

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• EMC XtremSW™ Cache

• EMC PowerPath®/VE

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 provides a business-collaboration platform for enterprise and commercial organizations. SharePoint enables organizations to share content and information through websites, blogs, wikis, and document libraries—some of the many features of a SharePoint environment. Content within these features can be managed collectively from start to finish.

The SharePoint Server 2013 platform comprises a rich set of integrated capabilities that can be used either out of the box or customized to address specific business needs and integrated with other products and solutions. The platform can be deployed both within the organization (through intranets) and outside of the firewall (through extranets and the Internet) to enable interaction with employees, customers, and business partners. Thoughts and ideas can be easily exchanged and discussed using the same set of capabilities and tools.

A SharePoint environment consists of multiple server roles combined into units called farms. The SharePoint Server 2013 farm in this solution includes the following server roles:

• Web server role: This server is responsible for the actual SharePoint pages that a user views. The role of the web server is to host web pages, web services, and the web parts that are required to process requests from users. The web server directs these requests to the application server, which returns the results to the web server.

• Application server role: This server runs all the SharePoint application services, including index crawling and search query services. It also hosts the SharePoint Central Administration website. You can add application servers to host services that can be deployed to a single server and used by all the servers in a farm. Services with similar usage and performance characteristics can be logically grouped on a server and, if necessary, hosted on multiple servers if a scale out is required to respond to performance or capacity requirements.

EMC recommends that you use three types of search application roles distributed across the application servers:

All-in-one—The server contains all of the search application roles:

− Query processing

− Index partition

− Crawler

− Content processing

− Analytics processing

− Administration

Crawler-type—The server has four roles:

− Crawler

− Content processing

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013

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Design Guide

− Analytics

− Administration

Query-type—The server has two roles:

− Query processing

− Index partitioning

• Database server role: These are servers that run the SharePoint databases, including the content databases, configuration databases, search databases, and so on. For this solution, we installed SQL Server 2012 with a back-end database role for SharePoint Server 2013.

SQL Server 2012 is Microsoft’s database management and analysis system for e-commerce, line-of-business, and data warehousing solutions. SQL Server is widely used to store, retrieve, and manage application data. Because it is used with a range of applications, and each application has different requirements for performance, sizing, availability, recoverability, manageability, and so on, it is important to fully understand these factors and plan accordingly when deploying SQL Server.

SharePoint Server 2013 is built on the SQL Server database engine and most of the content and SharePoint configurations are stored in the SQL Server databases. In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint, we used SQL Server 2012 as the back-end database application. SharePoint Server 2013 uses the following types of SQL Server databases:

• Configuration databases: The configuration database and Central Administration content database are called configuration databases. They contain data about farm settings such as the databases used, Internet Information Services (IIS) websites or web applications, solutions, web part packages, site templates, default quota, and blocked file types. A SharePoint farm can have only one set of configuration databases.

• Content databases: Content databases store all site content: site documents, such as files in document libraries, list data, web part properties, and user names and rights. All the data for a specific site resides in one content database. Each web application can contain many content databases. Each site collection can be associated with only one content database, although a content database can be associated with many site collections.

• Service application databases: Service application databases store data for use by a service application. The databases for service applications vary significantly in how they are used.

Figure 2 shows the server roles in the SharePoint farm and the related service components that we validated in this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for SharePoint. For detailed information about basic SharePoint Server 2013 concepts, refer to Appendix B: SharePoint Server 2013 Concepts.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012

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Figure 2. SharePoint Server 2013 topology

SharePoint Server 2013 also supports other service components. If you plan to design additional services for SharePoint Server 2013, refer to the Microsoft TechNet website for information about the performance of these features, capacity test results, and recommendations.

EMC has joined forces with IT infrastructure providers to create a complete virtualization solution that accelerates the deployment of private cloud. VSPEX enables faster deployment, greater simplicity and choice, higher efficiency, and lower risk. Validation by EMC ensures predictable performance and enables customers to select technology that uses their existing IT infrastructure while eliminating planning, sizing, and configuration burdens. VSPEX provides a virtual infrastructure for customers looking to gain the simplicity that is characteristic of truly converged infrastructures, while at the same time gaining more choices in individual stack components.

VSPEX solutions are proven by EMC and packaged and sold exclusively by EMC channel partners. VSPEX provides channel partners with more opportunity, a faster sales cycle, and end-to-end enablement. By working closely together, EMC and its channel partners can now deliver infrastructure that accelerates the journey to the cloud for even more customers.

EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructures

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Design Guide

VSPEX Proven Infrastructures, as shown in Figure 3, are modular, virtualized infrastructures validated by EMC and delivered by EMC partners. VSPEX includes virtualization, compute, and network layers, and EMC storage and backup, designed by EMC to deliver reliable and predictable performance.

Figure 3. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure

VSPEX provides the flexibility to choose network, server, and virtualization technologies that fit a customer’s environment to create a complete virtualization solution. VSPEX delivers faster deployment for EMC partner customers, with greater simplicity and efficiency, more choice, and lower risk to a customer’s business.

For more information about VSPEX Proven Infrastructures, refer to VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides.

Reference virtual machine

To simplify the virtual infrastructure discussion, VSPEX defines a reference virtual machine to represent a unit of measure for quantifying the compute resources in the VSPEX virtual infrastructure. By comparing the customer’s actual usage to this reference workload, you can extrapolate which reference architecture to choose.

The reference virtual machine is defined as a single virtual machine with the characteristics shown in Table 3. For more information about a reference virtual machine and its characteristics, refer to VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides.

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Table 3. Reference virtual machine: Characteristics

Characteristic Value

Virtual processors per virtual machine 1

RAM per virtual machine 2 GB

Available storage capacity per virtual machine 100 GB

Input/output operations per second (IOPS) per virtual machine 25

I/O pattern Random

I/O read:write ratio 2:1

Features and enhancements

The EMC VNX flash-optimized unified storage platform delivers innovation and enterprise capabilities for file, block, and object storage in a single, scalable, and easy-to-use solution. Ideal for mixed workloads in physical or virtual environments, VNX combines powerful and flexible hardware with advanced efficiency, management, and protection software to meet the demanding needs of today’s virtualized application environments.

VNX includes many features and enhancements designed and built upon the first generation’s success. These features and enhancements include:

• More capacity with multicore optimization with Multicore Cache, Multicore RAID, and Multicore FAST Cache (MCx)

• Greater efficiency with a flash-optimized hybrid array

• Better protection by increasing application availability with an active/active

• Easier administration and deployment by increasing productivity with the new Unisphere Management Suite

VSPEX is built with the Next-Generation VNX to deliver even greater efficiency, performance, and scale than ever before.

Flash-optimized hybrid array

VNX is a flash-optimized hybrid array that provides automated tiering to deliver the best performance to your critical data, while intelligently moving less frequently accessed data to lower cost disks.

In this hybrid approach, a small percentage of flash drives in the overall system can provide a high percentage of the overall IOPS. The flash-optimized VNX takes full advantage of the low latency of flash to deliver cost-saving optimization and high performance scalability. The EMC FAST Suite (FAST Cache and FAST VP) tiers both block and file data across heterogeneous drives and boosts the most active data to flash drives, ensuring that customers never have to make concessions for cost or performance.

Data generally is accessed most frequently at the time it is created; therefore new data is first stored on flash drives to provide the best performance. As that data ages and becomes less active over time, FAST VP tiers the data from high-performance to

EMC Next-Generation VNX

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Design Guide

high-capacity drives automatically, based on customer-defined policies. This functionality has been enhanced with four times better granularity and with new FAST VP solid state disks (SSDs) based on enterprise multilevel cell (eMLC) technology to lower the cost per gigabyte. FAST Cache dynamically absorbs unpredicted spikes in system workloads. All VSPEX use cases benefit from the increased efficiency.

VSPEX Proven Infrastructures deliver private cloud, end-user computing, and virtualized application solutions. With VNX, customers can achieve an even greater return on their investment. VNX provides out-of-band, block-based deduplication that can dramatically lower the costs of the flash tier.

VNX Intel MCx Code Path Optimization

The advent of flash technology has been a catalyst in totally changing the requirements of midrange storage systems. EMC redesigned the midrange storage platform to efficiently optimize multicore CPUs to provide the highest performing storage system at the lowest cost in the market.

MCx distributes all VNX data services across all cores (up to 32), as shown in Figure 4. The VNX series with MCx has dramatically improved the file performance for transactional applications like databases or virtual machines over network-attached storage (NAS).

Figure 4. Next-Generation VNX with multicore optimization

Multicore cache The cache is the most valuable asset in the storage subsystem; its efficient use is key to the overall efficiency of the platform in handling variable and changing workloads. The cache engine has been modularized to take advantage of all the cores available in the system.

Multicore RAID Another important part of the MCx redesign is the handling of I/O to the permanent back-end storage—hard disk drives (HDDs) and SSDs. Greatly increased performance improvements in VNX come from the modularization of the back-end data management processing, which enables MCx to seamlessly scale across all cores.

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VNX performance

Performance enhancements VNX storage, enabled with the MCx architecture, is optimized for FLASH 1st and provides unprecedented overall performance, optimizing for transaction performance (cost per IOPS), bandwidth performance (cost per GB/s) with low latency, and providing optimal capacity efficiency (cost per GB).

VNX provides the following performance improvements:

• Up to four times more file transactions when compared with dual controller arrays

• Increased file performance for transactional applications (for example, Microsoft Exchange on VMware over NFS) by up to three times with a 60 percent better response time

• Up to four times more Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server OLTP transactions

• Up to six times more virtual machines

Active/active array service processors The new VNX architecture provides active/active array service processors, as shown in Figure 5. This eliminates application timeouts during path failover, since both paths are actively serving I/O.

Figure 5. Active/active processors increase performance, resiliency, and efficiency

Load balancing has also been improved and applications can achieve up to two times improvement in performance. Active/active for block is ideal for applications that require the highest levels of availability and performance, but do not require tiering or efficiency services like compression, deduplication, or snapshot.

With this VNX release, VSPEX customers can use Virtual Data Movers (VDMs) and EMC VNX Replicator to perform automated and high-speed file system migrations between systems. This process migrates all snaps and settings automatically, and enables the clients to continue operations during the migration.

Note: The active/active processors are only available for classic logical unit numbers (LUNs), not for pool LUNs.

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Design Guide

Unisphere Management Suite

The Unisphere Management Suite extends Unisphere’s easy-to-use, interface to include VNX Monitoring and Reporting for validating performance and anticipating capacity requirements. As shown in Figure 6, the suite also includes Unisphere Remote for centrally managing up to thousands of VNX and VNXe systems with support for XtremSW Cache.

Figure 6. Unisphere Management Suite

Virtualization management

VMware Virtual Storage Integrator Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) is a no-charge VMware vCenter plug-in available to all VMware users with EMC storage. VSPEX customers can use VSI to simplify management of virtualized storage. VMware administrators can gain visibility into their VNX storage using the same familiar vCenter interface to which they are accustomed.

With VSI, IT administrators can do more work in less time. VSI offers unmatched access control that enables you to efficiently manage and delegate storage tasks with confidence. Perform daily management tasks with up 90 percent fewer clicks and up to 10 times higher productivity.

VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) offloads VMware storage-related functions from the server to the storage system, enabling more efficient use of server and network resources for increased performance and consolidation.

VMware vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness VMware vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) is a VMware-defined API that displays storage information through vCenter. Integration between VASA technology and VNX makes storage management in a virtualized environment a seamless experience.

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EMC Storage Integrator EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) is targeted towards the Windows and Application administrator. ESI is easy to use, delivers end-to end monitoring, and is hypervisor agnostic. Administrators can provision in both virtual and physical environments for a Windows platform, and troubleshoot by viewing the topology of an application from the underlying hypervisor to the storage.

Microsoft Hyper-V With Windows Server 2012, Microsoft provides Hyper-V 3.0, an enhanced hypervisor for private cloud that can run on NAS protocols for simplified connectivity.

Offloaded Data Transfer The Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX) feature of Microsoft Hyper-V enables data transfers during copy operations to be offloaded to the storage array, freeing up host cycles. For example, using ODX for a live migration of a SQL Server virtual machine doubled performance, decreased migration time by 50 percent, reduced CPU on the Hyper-V server by 20 percent, and eliminated network traffic.

The VNXe series is optimized for virtual applications delivering industry-leading innovation and enterprise capabilities for file, block, and object storage in a scalable, easy-to-use solution. The VNXe series is purpose-built for the IT manager in smaller environments.

VNXe features

VNXe supports the following features:

• Next-generation unified storage, optimized for virtualized applications

• Capacity optimization features including compression, deduplication, thin provisioning, and application-centric copies

• High availability, designed to deliver five 9s availability

• Multiprotocol support for file and block

• Simplified management with EMC Unisphere for a single management interface for all NAS, SAN, and replication needs

VNXe software suites

Table 4 lists the software suites that are available with VNXe.

Table 4. VNXe software suites

Suite Features

Local Protection Suite Increases productivity with snapshots of production data

Remote Protection Suite Protects data against localized failures, outages, and disasters

Application Protection Suite Automates application copies and proves compliance

Security and Compliance Suite Keeps data safe from changes, deletions, and malicious activity

EMC VNXe

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Design Guide

VNXe software packs available

Table 5 lists the software packs that are available with VNXe.

Table 5. VNXe software packs

Pack Features

VNXe3300 Total Protection Pack

Includes the Local, Remote, and Application Protection Suites

VNXe3150 Total Value Pack

Includes the Remote and Application Protection suites, and the Security and Compliance Suite

EMC backup and recovery solutions—Avamar and Data Domain—deliver the protection confidence needed to accelerate deployment of virtualized SharePoint.

Optimized for virtualized application environments, EMC backup and recovery reduces backup times by 90 percent and increases recovery speeds by 30 times—even offers instant virtual machine access—for worry-free protection. EMC backup appliances add another layer of assurance with end-to-end verification and self-healing for ensured recovery.

For SharePoint, EMC backup delivers advanced capabilities like VSS-based farm-level backups and fast, granular recovery of individual files without having to restore the whole farm. In addition, features such as auto-discovery and auto-configuration reduce complexity and save time while ensuring that critical data is always protected.

EMC backup and recovery solutions also deliver big savings. The integrated solutions with deduplication reduce backup storage by 10 to 30 times, backup management time by 81 percent, and bandwidth by 99 percent for efficient offsite replication—delivering a seven-month payback on average.

For full technical guidance, refer to EMC Backup and Recovery Options for VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Design and Implementation Guide. This guide describes how to design, size, and implement EMC backup solutions for VSPEX Proven Infrastructures for virtualized SharePoint.

VMware vSphere 5.1 transforms a computer’s physical resources by virtualizing the CPU, RAM, hard disk, and network controller. This transformation creates fully functional virtual machines that run isolated and encapsulated operating systems and applications just like physical computers.

VMware vSphere High Availability (HA) provides easy to use, cost-effective high availability for applications running in virtual machines. The VMware vSphere vMotion and VMware vSphere Storage vMotion features of vSphere 5.1 enable the seamless migration of virtual machines and stored files from one vSphere server to another, with minimal or no performance impact. Coupled with VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMware vSphere Storage DRS, virtual machines have access to the appropriate resources at any point in time through load balancing of compute and storage resources.

EMC backup and recovery solutions

VMware vSphere 5.1

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Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V provides a complete virtualization platform, which offers increased scalability and performance with a flexible solution from the data center to the cloud. It makes it easier for organizations to realize the cost savings from virtualization and to optimize server hardware investments.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V high-availability options include incremental backup support, enhancements in clustered environments to support virtual adapters within the virtual machine, and inbox network interface card (NIC) teaming. In Hyper-V, “shared nothing” live migration enables the migration of a virtual machine from a server running Hyper-V to another one without the need for both of them to be in the same cluster or to share storage.

If your customer has special performance requirements on SharePoint Server, consider using EMC XtremSW Cache (formerly known as EMC VFCache) as a solution. EMC XtremSW Cache is intelligent caching software that uses server-based flash technology to reduce latency and accelerate throughput for dramatic application performance improvement. XtremSW Cache accelerates reads and protects data by using a write-through cache to the networked storage to deliver persistent high availability, integrity, and disaster recovery. XtremSW Cache, coupled with array-based EMC FAST software, creates the most efficient and intelligent I/O path from the application to the data store. The result is a networked infrastructure that is dynamically optimized for performance, intelligence, and protection for both physical and virtual environments.

EMC recommends that you install EMC PowerPath for advanced multipathing functionality such as intelligent path testing and performance optimization.

EMC PowerPath/VE provides intelligent, high-performance path management with path failover and load balancing optimized for EMC and selected third-party storage systems. PowerPath/VE supports multiple paths between a vSphere host and an external storage device. Having multiple paths enables the vSphere host to access a storage device, even if a specific path is unavailable. Multiple paths can also share the I/O traffic to a storage device. PowerPath/VE is particularly beneficial in highly available environments because it can prevent operational interruptions and downtime. The PowerPath/VE path failover capability avoids host failure by maintaining uninterrupted application support on the host in the event of a path failure (if another path is available).

PowerPath/VE works with VMware ESXi as a Multipath Plug-in (MPP) that provides path management to hosts. It is installed as a kernel module on the vSphere host. It plugs in to the vSphere I/O stack framework to bring the advanced multipathing capabilities of PowerPath/VE, including dynamic load balancing and automatic failover, to the vSphere hosts.

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V

EMC XtremSW Cache

EMC PowerPath/VE

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Chapter 4: Choosing a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure


Design Guide

Chapter 4 Choosing a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure


Overview .................................................................................................................. 34

Step 1: Evaluate the customer use case ................................................................... 34

Step 2: Design the application architecture ............................................................. 37

Step 3: Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure ............................................. 41

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Overview

This chapter describes how to design the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution and how to choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure on which to layer SharePoint. Table 6 outlines the main steps you need to complete when selecting a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Table 6. VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013: Design process

Step Action

1 Evaluate the customer’s SharePoint workload by using the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet. See Step 1: Evaluate the customer use case.

2 Determine the required infrastructure, SharePoint resources, and architecture using the VSPEX Sizing Tool. See Step 2: Design the application architecture.

Note: If the Sizing Tool is not available, you can manually size the application using the guidelines in Appendix D: High-level SharePoint Server 2013 Sizing Logic and Methodology.

3 Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, based on the recommendations from Step 2. See Step 3: Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Step 1: Evaluate the customer use case

Before you choose any VSPEX solution, it is important to gather information about the customer’s business infrastructure and workload requirements, in order to design the SharePoint environment properly. To help you to better understand the customer’s business requirements for the VSPEX infrastructure design, EMC recommends that you use the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet in 0 when evaluating the workload requirements for the VSPEX solution.

0: VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet presents a list of simple questions to help identify customer requirements, usage characteristics, and datasets. Appendix B: SharePoint Server 2013 Concepts provides a detailed explanation of the qualification worksheet and general guidance on how to determine input values.

Overview

VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet

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Design Guide

Table 7 provides a detailed explanation of the qualification worksheet and general guidance on how to determine input values.

Table 7. VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet guidelines

Question Description

How many SharePoint 2013 farms do you plan to host in your VSPEX Proven Infrastructure?

To identify the number of SharePoint 2013 farms to plan for on your VSPEX Proven infrastructure. SharePoint 2013 enables you to independently create multiple farms for your organization. The VSPEX Proven Infrastructure is designed for up to three SharePoint 2013 farms.

Note: If a customer plans to have more than one farm in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, complete all of the following questions in this worksheet for each SharePoint 2013 farm.

Included number of years’ growth?

To define the number of years’ growth that will be calculated in the VSPEX Sizing Tool. Future growth is a key characteristic of the VSPEX solution. This answer helps you to understand the customer’s plan for future growth. EMC recommends that you plan for at least one year’s growth when using the VSPEX Sizing Tool.

Annual growth rate (%)? To define the expected annual growth rate for the amount of data in your SharePoint environment. Future growth is a key characteristic of the VSPEX solution. Enter a number that is appropriate for your environment.

Is the SharePoint Web application going to be accessed globally?

To define the user base of a SharePoint 2013 solution, you need to consider the total number of users and how they are geographically distributed. The answer helps you to understand the peak user base for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution.

Initial farm size (GB)? To define the volume of the content database that is stored in the SharePoint system. The volume of content is an important element for sizing disk capacity because it can influence the performance of other features and can also potentially affect network latency and available bandwidth.

If it is your first time to estimate your content database size, refer to Estimating content database size.

Number of users? To define the total number of unique users that will access the SharePoint environment. This element is important for defining the resources required in the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution.

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User concurrency at peak (%)? Concurrency of users is defined as the total percentage of users actively using the system at peak time. The combination of the number of users and user concurrency defines the user connections to SharePoint at peak time.

What is the main purpose of the SharePoint Web application?

A farm's performance can be affected not only by the number of users interacting with the system, but also by their usage characteristics. The VSPEX Sizing Tool defines the two operations in general use:

Publishing Portal: The website used for social sites and collaboration in the organization.

Document Management Portal: The website used to control the life cycle of documents in the organization.

Select either Publishing Portal or Document Management Portal for your customer’s environment. If your customers are planning to apply SharePoint for other usage characteristics, contact EMC through your Partner Development Manager for information on SharePoint sizing.

Do you use or intend to use the MySites function?

Because MySite users can edit their profiles, generate activities, upload and download documents, and so on, additional planning of the storage and capacity needs of the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution is required. Enter Yes or No for the customer’s environment.

What is the percentage of the total users who will create MySites?

Use the answer to this question to estimate the additional storage for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution.

What is the quota for a single MySite (MB)?

SharePoint Server includes a default Personal Site quota template, which has a storage limit of 100 MB and no user limit. This quota template is used for each user's individual site collection in their MySite. If the default settings for this template do not meet your needs, you can edit it. This factor is important for defining additional storage for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution.

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Design Guide


Do you intend to enable FAST VP? FAST VP automatically optimizes performance in a tiered environment reducing costs, footprint, and management effort.

FAST VP maximizes the utilization of the flash drive capacity for high IOPS workloads and maximizes the utilization of near-line SAS (NL-SAS) drives for capacity-intensive applications.

FAST VP can lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase performance by intelligently managing data placement at a sub-LUN level. When FAST VP is implemented, the storage system measures, analyzes, and implements a dynamic storage-tiering policy much faster and more efficiently than a human analyst could ever achieve.

Enter Yes or No for the customer’s business requirements.

Do you heavily rely on SharePoint search functionality?

A SharePoint farm where users rely heavily on search functionality drives the following requirements of the system:

Updated search indexes, which means most recently added content can be quickly found in search result

High volume of items to be searched

Such requirements need more back-end I/O to support.

Enter Yes or No for the customer’s environment.

Step 2: Design the application architecture

After you evaluate your customer’s SharePoint real workload and requirements, use the VSPEX Sizing Tool for virtualized SharePoint to design your VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution.

Principles and guidelines

The VSPEX Proven Infrastructure reference architectures create a pool of resources that are sufficient to host a target number of reference virtual machines with the characteristics shown in Table 3. For more information about a reference virtual machine and its characteristics, refer to the relevant documents in VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides.

VSPEX Sizing Tool output: Requirements and recommendations

The VSPEX Sizing Tool enables you to input up to three SharePoint farm configurations from the customer’s answers in the qualification worksheets. After you complete the inputs to the VSPEX Sizing Tool, the tool generates a series of recommendations, as listed in Table 8.

Overview

VSPEX Sizing Tool

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Table 8. VSPEX Sizing Tool output

Type VSPEX Sizing Tool recommendation

Description Reference

Individual farm SharePoint farm configuration

Provides suggestions about farm topology.

For example, medium or small farm.

SharePoint Server 2013 fundamentals

Individual farm VSPEX configuration suggestion

Sums up the reference virtual machines consumed in each farm.

VSPEX Sizing Tool for Virtualized SharePoint

Individual farm Reference virtual machine suggestions for each SharePoint role

Provides detailed information including the number of virtual machines, vCPU, memory, IOPS, and the capacity of the operation system volume in each farm.

Reference virtual machine best practices for SharePoint roles

Individual farm Key metrics and thresholds

Provides key performance metrics that you may need to meet in the validation tests for each farm.

Understanding key metrics

Individual farm Additional storage pool suggestions

Additional storage pools recommendation for SharePoint data including content database, search components, and so on in each farm.

In this VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution, customers may need to add more disks and storage pools to the infrastructure layer to meet different business requirements, based on performance and capacity considerations for each SharePoint farm.

Storage layouts and design considerations

Total Total reference virtual machines

Sums up the reference virtual machines required in the virtual infrastructure for all the SharePoint farms.

This helps you to design and select the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure in the design phase, and combine SharePoint with other applications.


Total Additional disks information summary

Summary of the additional disks required for SharePoint data, including the content databases, Services databases, and MySites content databases of all SharePoint farms.


For more information, refer to the examples in Step 3: Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

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Design Guide

Reference virtual machine best practices for SharePoint roles

The VSPEX Sizing Tool provides detailed recommendations for the reference virtual machine resources required for your customer’s SharePoint environment, based on the following basic resource types for each SharePoint role:

• vCPU resources

• Memory resources

• OS capacity resources

• OS IOPS

This section describes the resource types, how they are used in the VSPEX Sizing Tool, and key considerations and best practices for a customer environment.

• vCPU resources best practices

The VSPEX Sizing Tool provides the vCPU of the reference virtual machine (measurement unit) consumed for each SharePoint role from the virtual infrastructure. The CPU type must meet or exceed the CPU or processor models as defined in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides. We validated this VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution with a statically assigned processor, and no virtual-to-physical CPU oversubscription.

In SharePoint Server deployments, EMC recommends that you allocate multiple quad-core web servers that can be easily virtualized and scaled out. The application servers' processor capacity requirements differ, depending on the role of the server and the services it is running. In this solution, we used multiple quad-core application servers, mainly for search considerations on the medium SharePoint farm, which proved best during testing. If you are planning additional services on the SharePoint application server, consider reserving more processor resources.

As the crawler server role of the SharePoint 2013 Search service application requires a lot of CPU resources, EMC recommends you assign it 12 cores.

The processor capacity requirements for SQL Server also depend on the service databases that a SQL Server-based computer is hosting. In the small farm, we used a quad-core virtualized SQL Server, which we found to be acceptable. In the medium farm, we used an eight-core virtualized SQL Server that yielded good results during testing. If the farm is even bigger—for example, if there are five web servers—SQL Server will require 16 cores to stay in the Green Zone. For SQL Server, the Green Zone means that CPU utilization is kept at less than 50 percent. For detailed design best practices for vCPUs, refer to Virtualization design considerations.

• Memory resources best practices

The VSPEX Sizing Tool shows the recommended memory and the equivalent reference virtual machines for each SharePoint role. We validated this VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution with statically assigned memory, no over-commitment of memory resources, and no memory swapping or ballooning. The memory values provided in the tool are not hard limits but represent the values that were tested in the VSPEX solution.

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In general, web server memory requirements are highly dependent on the number of application pools enabled in the farm and the number of concurrent requests being served. For most production SharePoint Server deployments, EMC recommends that you allocate at least 12 GB of RAM on each web server and application server. For information about the SQL memory recommendations in this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, refer to VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides.

• OS capacity resource sizing best practices

The VSPEX Sizing Tool shows the recommended capacity of the reference virtual machine (measurement unit) suggested for the operating system for each SharePoint role. For this solution, EMC recommends that you put the OS volume into the VSPEX private cloud pool. For more information about the VSPEX private cloud pool, refer to VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides.

In the medium and small SharePoint farms, EMC recommends that the web servers and application servers allocate at least 100 GB of disk space for the OS and log files.

• OS IOPS sizing best practices

The VSPEX Sizing Tool shows the estimated IOPS of the reference virtual machine (measurement unit) suggested for each SharePoint role in the OS. EMC recommends that you put the OS volume into the VSPEX private cloud pool. In this scenario, we considered performance characteristics from the application perspective more than from the capacity perspective.

The VSPEX Sizing Tool shows suggestions for the number of virtual machines for each SharePoint role. These numbers are calculated based on the answers in the qualification worksheet, which identify the business requirements.

For more information, refer to the examples in Step 3: Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Additional considerations and best practices

After you obtain a recommended sizing guide from the VSPEX Sizing Tool, you may need to consider some additional key areas:

• Search external data in SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 provides support for searching external content, such as public websites, file shares, Exchange public folders, and so on. If customers want to crawl and search through external data, you need to define the additional capacity demand and factor this into the storage layout design.

• Customization

Adding custom code to frequently used pages in the SharePoint environment is a common cause of performance issues. Adding custom code can generate additional round trips to the database servers or web services to service data requests. Customization of infrequently used pages might not significantly impact the throughput, but even well-optimized code can decrease the farm throughput if it is requested thousands of times a day.

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Design Guide

If you have custom code in the SharePoint environment, EMC recommends that you contact the vendor to design the capacity for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution for any additional reference virtual machines required by custom code.

• Future growth

It is important to plan for growth so that the environment can continue to deliver an effective business solution. To maintain performance targets and accommodate growth, the VSPEX Sizing Tool enables customers to select from one to three years growth. The cost of over-investment in hardware is usually far less than the cumulative expense of troubleshooting problems caused by undersizing.

• Additional services for SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 provides many additional features—for example, Access Services, Business Connectivity Services, and Excel Services. This VSPEX solution focuses on SharePoint core features like Search Services, User Profile Services, and the MySites function. If you plan to design additional services for SharePoint 2013, EMC recommends that you refer to the article Performance and capacity test results and recommendations (SharePoint Server 2013) on the Microsoft TechNet website for performance and capacity test results and recommendations for different features.

Step 3: Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure

This section describes two examples of SharePoint 2013 farms—one small, one medium—and demonstrates how you would select the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for each one. For more information about selecting a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, refer to 0: VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet.

The VSPEX program has produced numerous solutions designed to simplify the deployment of a consolidated virtual infrastructure using vSphere, Hyper-V, the VNX and VNXe family of products, and EMC Backup and recovery. After the application architecture has been confirmed using the VSPEX Sizing Tool, you can choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure based on the calculated results.

Note: While this Design Guide is intended for SharePoint Server farm requirements, this may not be the only application intended for deployment on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. You must carefully take into account the requirements for each application you plan to deploy.

Follow the steps in Table 9 when choosing a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Table 9. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure: Selection steps

Step Action

1 Use the VSPEX Sizing Tool to get the total number of reference virtual machines and additional suggested storage layout.

Overview

Considerations

41

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608068.aspx




Step Action

2 Use the VSPEX Sizing Tool to design the resource requirements for other applications, based on business needs. The VSPEX Sizing Tool calculates the total number of required reference virtual machines and additional recommended storage layouts for both SharePoint and other applications.

3 Discuss with your customers the maximum utilization of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for combined applications to meet their business requirements. Input the maximum utilization percentage in the VSPEX Sizing Tool. The tool provides a recommendation for the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure offering.

4 Select your network vendor and hypervisor software vendor for the recommended VSPEX Proven Infrastructure offering. For more information, visit the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure partner portal.

For more information about the required reference virtual machines, refer to the relevant sizing sections in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides.

Example 1: SharePoint small farm

In this scenario, a customer would like to create a small SharePoint 2013 farm for an intranet-publishing portal on a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. The customer has a locally accessed farm, with about 800 GB of content data spread across three content databases of varying sizes. The expected user count of the farm is 1,000 users, of which 10 percent will be accessing the farm at any peak time. The customer would like to use at most 75 percent of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for applications.

After talking to the customer, complete the qualification worksheet for the production SharePoint Server 2013 farm, as shown in Table 10.

Table 10. Example qualification worksheet: Small SharePoint farm

Question Example answer

How many SharePoint farms do you plan to host in your VSPEX Proven Infrastructure?

1

Included number of years’ growth? 1

SharePoint Farm 1

Annual growth rate (%)? 10

Is the SharePoint Web application going to be accessed globally? No

Initial farm size (GB)? 800

Number of users? 1,000

User concurrency at peak (%)? 10

What is the main purpose of the SharePoint Web application? Publishing Portal

Do you use or intend to use the MySites function? No

What is the percentage of total users who will create MySites? N/A

What is the quota for a single MySites (MB)? N/A

Examples

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Design Guide


Do you heavily rely on SharePoint Search function? Yes

Do you intend to enable FAST VP? No

After you input the answers from the qualification worksheet into the VSPEX Sizing Tool, the tool generates recommendations for the resources required from the resource pool, as shown in the example in Table 11. For detailed steps on using the VSPEX Sizing Tool, refer to Appendix D: High-level SharePoint Server 2013 Sizing Logic and Methodology.

Table 11. Example of required resources: Small SharePoint farm

SharePoint server role vCPU Memory OS volume capacity

OS volume IOPS

Number of virtual machines

Total number of reference virtual machines

Web server Resource requirements

4 12 GB 100 GB Less than 25

1 6 Equivalent reference virtual machines

4 6 1 1

SQL Server Resource requirements



4 4 1 1

Application server

(All-in-one)

Resource requirements



12 6 1 1

Total number of equivalent reference virtual machines 22

For example, each web server requires four vCPUs, 12 GB of memory, 100 GB of storage, and 25 IOPS. This translates to:

• Four reference virtual machines for the CPU requirement

• Six reference virtual machines for the memory requirement

• One reference virtual machine for the capacity requirement

• One reference virtual machine for the IOPS requirement

The VSPEX Sizing Tool also lists recommendations for the storage layout as shown in Table 12. In this case, therefore, implementing this small SharePoint farm on a VSPEX private cloud pool would consume the resources of 22 reference virtual machines.

The suggested storage layout for the SharePoint data is in addition to the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure VNXe pool. For more information, refer to Principles and guidelines.

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Table 12. Example of SharePoint farm details in VSPEX Sizing Tool

VSPEX configuration suggestions (total reference virtual machines)

22

Recommended additional storage layout

Pool name RAID type Disk type Disk capacity Number

of disks

SharePoint content database pool RAID 5 (4+1) SAS disks 15,000 rpm 300 GB 5

SharePoint services pool RAID 10 (3+3) SAS disks 15,000 rpm 300 GB 6

The VSPEX Sizing Tool also lists the key metrics for performance validation, as shown in Table 13. For a detailed explanation of these key metrics, refer to Understanding key metrics.

Table 13. Example of performance key metrics: Small SharePoint farm

Key metrics Thresholds User profile usage

Passed tests per second More than 4

Browse operation Less than 3 seconds 80%

Search operation Less than 3 seconds 10%

Modify operation Less than 3 seconds 10%

Operation states • SQL Server CPU usage less than 50%

• Web server CPU usage less than 70%

• Failure rate less than 0.01%

SharePoint is the only application planned for deployment on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. To implement this small SharePoint 2013 farm on a pool for 50 reference virtual machines, EMC recommends that customers consider the following two VSPEX infrastructures for the best fit with their requirements:

• EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: VMware vSphere 5.1 for up to 100 virtual machines

• EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V for up to 100 virtual machines

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Design Guide

In this example, the small SharePoint 2013 farm consumes the resources of 22 reference virtual machines and leaves resources for 28 reference virtual machines available in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7. Required resources example: VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for small SharePoint 2013 farm

Note: The required resource shown in Figure 7 is not a hard limit; you can select larger VSPEX Proven Infrastructures if requirements from multiple applications make it necessary. In the Implementation Guide, we used Microsoft Hyper-V for 50 virtual machines as a VSPEX solution example. For more information, refer to VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides.

Example 2: SharePoint medium farm

In this scenario, a customer would like to create a medium SharePoint 2013 farm for the company’s intranet Document Management Portal on a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. The customer has a locally accessed farm, with about 4 TB of content data spread across four content databases of varying sizes. The expected user count of the farm is 5,000 users. During the business day, 85 percent of users will log onto the portal as the intranet homepage in the morning, which is a peak time. You must define the primary purpose of the SharePoint farm because this is relevant for subsequent CPU and storage resource recommendations. The customer also plans for other applications on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, which are outside the scope of this Design Guide. The SharePoint combined with other applications requires a total of 180 reference virtual machines. In addition, the customer would like to use at most 75 percent utilization of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for combined applications.

After talking to the customer, complete the VSPEX qualification worksheet for the production SharePoint 2013 farm, as in the example shown in Table 14.

Table 14. Example VSPEX qualification worksheet: Medium SharePoint farm



1


SharePoint Farm 1


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Initial farm size (GB)? 4,000



What is the main purpose of the SharePoint Web application? Document Management Portal



What is the quota for a single MySite (MB)? N/A

Do you heavily rely on SharePoint Search function? Yes


After you input the answers into the VSPEX Sizing Tool, it generates recommendations for the resources needed from the resource pool, as shown in the example in Table 15.

Table 15. Example of required resources: Medium SharePoint farm


OS volume IOPS



Web server Resource requirements

4

12 GB

100 GB

Less than 25


4 6 1 1

SQL Server Resource requirements



16 8 1 1

Application server

(Query-type)




4 6 1 1

Application server

(Crawler-type)




12 6 1 1

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Design Guide


OS volume IOPS



Total number of equivalent reference virtual machines 82

The VSPEX Sizing Tool also lists recommendations for the storage layout, as shown in Table 16. In this case, therefore, implementing this medium SharePoint farm on a virtual infrastructure pool would consume the resources of 82 reference virtual machines.

The suggested storage layout to store SharePoint data is in addition to the VSPEX private cloud pool. For more information, refer to Appendix C: VSPEX Sizing Tool for Virtualized SharePoint.

Table 16. Example summary: Medium SharePoint farm in VSPEX Sizing Tool

VSPEX configuration recommendations (total reference virtual machines)

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Recommended additional storage layout

Pool name RAID type Disk type Disk capacity Number

of disks

SharePoint content database pool

RAID 5 (4+1) SAS disks 10,000 rpm 900 GB 10

SharePoint services pool RAID 10 (4+4) SAS disks 10,000 rpm 900 GB 8

The VSPEX Sizing Tool also lists the key metrics for performance validation, as shown in Table 17. For a detailed explanation of these key metrics, refer to Understanding key metrics.

Table 17. Example performance key metrics: Medium SharePoint farm

Key metrics Thresholds User profile usage

Passed tests per second More than 50

Browse operation Less than 3 seconds 50%

Search operation Less than 3 seconds 20%

Modify operation Less than 3 seconds 20%

Upload operation Less than 3 seconds 10%

Operation states • SQL Server CPU usage less than 50%

• Web server CPU usage less than 70%

• Failure rate less than 0.01%

SharePoint is not the only application that the customer needs to plan for in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. To implement this medium SharePoint farm on a pool for 1,000 reference virtual machines, EMC recommends using the VSPEX Sizing Tool to

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design the combined applications workload that has the best fit with the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure offering.

Because the total combined applications required 180 reference virtual machines and 75 percent utilization of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, EMC recommends that customers consider the following two VSPEX Proven Infrastructures for the best fit with their requirements:

• EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: VMware vSphere 5.1 for up to 1,000 virtual machines

• EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V for up to 1,000 virtual machines

In this example, the medium SharePoint 2013 farm consumes the resources of 82 reference virtual machines. Figure 8 shows the required resources for a SharePoint medium farm and 918 reference virtual machines, available in the 1,000 reference virtual machine VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Figure 8. Required resources example: VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for medium SharePoint farm

In the Implementation Guide, we used vSphere 1,000 virtual machines as a VSPEX solution example. For more information, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

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Chapter 5: Solution Design Considerations and Best Practices


Design Guide

Chapter 5 Solution Design Considerations and Best Practices


Overview .................................................................................................................. 50

Network design considerations ................................................................................ 50

Storage layouts and design considerations ............................................................. 52

Virtualization design considerations ........................................................................ 64

Application design considerations ........................................................................... 66

Backup and recovery design considerations ............................................................ 69

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Overview

This chapter describes best practices and considerations for designing the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution. It covers the following VSPEX infrastructure layers and components:

• Network

• Storage layout

• Virtualization

• Application

For information on design considerations and best practices for EMC backup and recovery solutions for your SharePoint environment, refer to EMC Backup and Recovery Options for VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Design and Implementation Guide.

Network design considerations

Networking in the virtual world follows the same concepts as in the physical world, but some of these concepts are applied in the software instead of using physical cables and switches. Although many of the best practices that apply in the physical world continue to apply in the virtual world, there are additional considerations for traffic segmentation, availability, and throughput.

The advanced networking features of the VNXe and VNX series provide protection against network connection failures at the array. Meanwhile, each hypervisor host has multiple connections to the user and storage Ethernet networks to guard against link failures. You should spread these across multiple Ethernet switches to guard against component failure in the network.

The network connection for the boot volume of VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 can be FC, FCoE, or iSCSI for NFS and CIFS on VNX, and iSCSI for CIFS and NFS on VNXe.

To bring SharePoint into your VSPEX infrastructure on VNX or VNXe, you can use the existing network infrastructure or set up additional iSCSI, FC, FCoE, CIFS, or NFS connections for SharePoint databases and other components.

For more information, refer to VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides.

In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint, EMC recommends that you consider the following aspects for network design:

• Separating different network traffic

Keep the virtual machine, storage, and vSphere vMotion or Microsoft Windows Hyper-V Live Migration network traffic separate using VLAN segmentation.

Overview

Network design best practices

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Design Guide

• Setting up network redundancy

A goal of redundant topologies is to eliminate network downtime caused by a single point of failure. All networks need redundancy for enhanced reliability. Network reliability is achieved through reliable equipment and network designs that are tolerant to failures and faults. Networks should be designed to reconverge rapidly so that the fault is bypassed. In this solution, we have two network switches and all three networks have their own redundant link.

• Using NIC teaming

Aggregate multiple network connections in parallel to increase throughput beyond what a single connection can sustain, and to provide redundancy in case one of the links fails. For example, in the VMware virtualization environment, use two physical NICs per vSwitch and uplink the physical NICs to separate physical switches.

When specifying the NIC teaming settings, it is best practice to select no for the NIC teaming failback option. If there is some intermittent behavior in the network, this will prevent flip-flopping of the NIC cards being used.

When setting up vSphere HA, it is a good starting point to also set the following ESX server timeouts and settings under the ESX Server advanced setting tab:

NFS.HeartbeatFrequency = 12

NFS.HeartbeatTimeout = 5

NFS.HeartbeatMaxFailures = 10

For more NIC teaming best practices for vSphere, refer to Best Practices for running VMware vSphere on Network Attached Storage.

For the NIC teaming configuration of Windows 2012 in a Hyper-V virtualized environment, refer to the Microsoft TechNet topic NIC Teaming Overview.

For other best practices in network design for the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, refer to VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides.

Note: If you are using iSCSI connections, EMC recommends that you do not use NIC teaming.

• Using hardware load balancing or Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB)

NLB is particularly useful for ensuring that stateless applications, such as a web server running IIS, are scalable by adding additional servers as the load increases. Load-balancing servers (also called hosts) in a cluster communicate among themselves to provide key benefits, including:

Scalability: NLB scales the performance of a server-based program, such as a web server, by distributing its client requests across multiple servers within the cluster. As traffic increases, additional servers can be added to the cluster, with up to 32 servers possible in any one cluster.

High availability: NLB provides high availability by automatically detecting the failure of a server and repartitioning client traffic among the remaining servers within ten seconds, while providing users with continuous service.

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SharePoint supports hardware load balancing that provides various layers of security filtering, caching, compression, and other advanced features that Windows NLB does not have.

For more information on creating a Windows NLB cluster, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides. For other best practices in network design for the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, refer to VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides.

Storage layouts and design considerations

The best practice and design considerations in this section provide guidelines for effectively planning storage for various business requirements in SharePoint Server 2013 environments.

Figure 9 shows the high-level architecture of the SharePoint components and storage elements validated in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint on a vSphere virtualization platform. All the SharePoint volumes are stored in virtual machine disk (VMDK) format on iSCSI datastores.

Figure 9. SharePoint 2013 storage elements on a VMware vSphere 5.1 platform

Overview

52



Design Guide

In addition to the VSPEX private cloud pool for virtual machines, EMC recommends that you use three additional storage pools to store SharePoint data for different purposes. For more information, see Table 18.

Table 18. SharePoint related storage pools name and the purpose

Pool name Purpose RAID recommendation

VSPEX private cloud pool

The pool where all the virtual machines reside. For details, refer to the appropriate VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides.

Refer to the appropriate VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides

SharePoint content databases pool

The pool where all content database data and their logs reside.

RAID 5 with SAS disks

SharePoint services pool

The pool for SharePoint query and crawl components and all the service databases.

RAID 10 with SAS disks

SharePoint MySites content databases pool

The pool for SharePoint MySites content database data and log files.

RAID 6 with NL-SAS disks

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Figure 10 shows the high-level architecture of the SharePoint components and storage elements validated in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for SharePoint on a Microsoft Window Server 2012 Hyper-V virtualization platform.

Figure 10. SharePoint 2013 storage elements on Hyper-V platform

All the SharePoint volumes are stored in the new Hyper-V virtual hard disk format (VHDX) on the cluster-shared volume (CSV). For more information on additional storage pools to store SharePoint data, see Table 18.

In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint, consider the best practices in the following sections for storage layout and design.

SharePoint design best practices

SharePoint content databases pool • Use RAID 5 for the SharePoint content database storage pool where the

SharePoint content databases reside. This is because RAID 5 provides high capacity utilization, along with good I/O performance, at a low cost. This applies to both the VNXe and VNX series.

Storage design best practices

54



Design Guide

• Use SAS disks for both performance and capacity considerations. In the VSPEX Sizing Tool, the disk number of each pool is calculated to meet both capacity and IOPS requirements.

• Reserve a buffer for the content database capacity volume. All SharePoint content resides in the content database, which means it can grow at a certain rate. Consider this factor when planning the capacity for your content databases. In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, we reserved an additional 30 percent buffer for the content database capacity volumes.

• Use thin LUNs to store SharePoint content database in order to improve the storage efficiency. After FAST VP SSDs are added, thin LUN metadata is promoted to the extreme performance tier to boost the performance. FAST VP can manage data replacement at a sub-LUN level intelligently.

SharePoint services pool • Use RAID 10 for the SharePoint services storage pool. This pool consists of all

the SharePoint services components, configuration databases, and tempdb, except the content database. The composition of this pool depends on which features or services you want to enable in SharePoint, according to your business requirements.

• One of the most demanding components is the SharePoint Server Search function, which has a very important role in this pool. When the SharePoint Server Search function is started and the corresponding Search Service Application has been created, four search databases are generated. For more information about the basic concepts of search components, refer to Appendix B: SharePoint Server 2013 Concepts.

During the crawl, all the crawled items are temporarily downloaded and stored in the index temporary location. The index temporary location resides in the SharePoint application servers that host the crawler component.

Table 19 details an example of the I/O pattern of this component, showing that the IOPS is high and the read:write size is large. In this situation, EMC recommends that you change its default location (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Data\) to the SharePoint services pool, which is RAID 10.

Table 19. Example I/O pattern of the index temporary location in SharePoint Server 2013

IOPS Read:Write Read size (KB) Write size (KB)

410 2:3 129 90

For more information about how to change this location, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

• Use SAS disks for both performance and capacity considerations. In our VSPEX Sizing Tool, the disk number of each pool is calculated to meet both capacity and IOPS requirements.

• Put the SQL Server tempdb database on a RAID 10 array for the best performance because tempdb is write-intensive into the SharePoint services pool. For more information about best practices for the tempdb database, refer

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to the Application design best practices for SQL Server 2012 for SharePoint Server 2013.

• Use thin LUNs for the SharePoint service pool to improve storage efficiency.

SharePoint MySite content database pool (if applicable) • Use RAID 6 with NL-SAS for the SharePoint MySite pool. The SharePoint MySite

pool, which is not illustrated in the storage layout diagram, consists of a content database, which is only used for MySite.

• Considering that MySite has relatively low client access and the main design factor is the capacity, EMC recommends that you set this pool to RAID 6 with NL-SAS for high capacity considerations.

• Use thin LUNs for the SharePoint MySite content database pool to improve storage efficiency.

Estimating the SharePoint search volume capacity The VSPEX Sizing Tool calculates the recommended disk requirements for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution. You may also need to calculate the total capacity of the volume for the SharePoint search components. Some guidelines for volume capacity planning are as follows:

1. Understand your customer’s estimate of the total content database size with yearly growth for crawl needs. You can easily get this number from the qualification worksheet. The value is referred to as ContentDBSize in the formula.

TotalIndexSize = ContentDBSize * 0.04

2. Determine the number of index partitions you will have, based on your scenario. Divide the TotalIndexSize by the number of index partitions.

3. Multiply each query component by 2 to calculate the disk volume capacity for a single query component to allow room for index merging.

For example, in the medium SharePoint farm, you will have four index partitions. Use the following formula to calculate each query component’s size:

QueryComponentIndexSize = TotalIndexSize / 4 * 2

4. Calculate the size of the search-related databases. Use the following formula to estimate the total volume capacity of all four search-related databases:

SearchDBs = ContentDBSize * 0.01

5. Multiply the size of all four search-related databases by 2 to calculate the disk volume capacity for these databases.

For example, in the medium SharePoint farm, you have 4 TB content databases. In this case, you would calculate the volume size to host the analytics reporting database, the crawl store database, the search administration database, and the link store database as follows:

SearchDBs = 4 TB * 0.01 * 2 = 80 GB

For detailed steps on how to scale out search components, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

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Design Guide

Using 64 KB of the file allocation unit size (cluster size) for the SharePoint volumes Cluster size is determined when the partition is formatted by the OS or user. For the best performance, EMC recommends that you use 64 KB for SQL databases. For more information, refer to the topic Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server in the MSDN Library.

Customization consideration If customers have custom code for the SharePoint farm, EMC recommends that customers work together with vendors to estimate the additional capacity and IOPS requirement for the storage layout.

VNX for file design best practices

When creating LUNs for VNX for file, consider the following best practices:

• Create approximately one LUN for every four drivers in the storage pool.

• Create the LUNs in even multiples of 10.

• Numbers of LUNs = (number of drivers in pool divided by 4), rounded up to the nearest multiple of 10.

• Make all the LUNs the same size.

• Balance LUN ownership across SPA and SPB.

For more information, refer to EMC VNX Unified Best Practices for Performance.

FAST Suite design best practices

As an extensible and customizable collaboration platform, usage patterns and workloads on SharePoint Server 2013 can vary greatly. While this guide caters and designs for typical deployments, as described by Microsoft and experienced by EMC, additional storage performance requirements may be demanded by certain highly active SharePoint environments.

The EMC FAST Suite—FAST VP and FAST Cache—provides two key technologies, available on the VNX series, that enable extreme performance in an automated fashion, when and where needed. FAST technology is an available option in VSPEX Proven Infrastructures. For more information on the FAST Suite for VSPEX Proven Infrastructures, refer to VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides.

As SharePoint has a significant number of active storage elements (such as databases, search indexes, and so on), it can be difficult to manually analyze and provision storage designs, and to continue to meet those ever-changing requirements. In such SharePoint environments, extreme performance demands are put on the storage to meet or exceed customer-driven response time service-level agreements (SLAs) and to continue to provide the best user experience.

Enabling FAST Cache or FAST VP is a transparent operation to SharePoint and no reconfiguration or downtime is necessary.

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FAST VP design best practices

In VNX, FAST VP enables the SharePoint content database data to move automatically between FAST VP SSDs and NL-SAS tiers with a slice granularity of 256 MB, which helps to reduce the response time and improve SharePoint request per second (RPS) with a lower cost. EMC recommends that you enable FAST VP on the VNX system and add additional flash disks as an extreme performance tier into the SharePoint content database pool. For best use of the flash tier, set all LUNs to auto-tier. You can verify this in the Advanced Data Services section for the storage pool properties in Unisphere.

• Flash drives for extreme performance FAST VP tier

By adding additional FAST VP SSDs as the extreme performance tier into the SharePoint content database pool, FAST VP can automatically adapt to changes with business cycles.

When using FAST VP SSDs as a FAST VP tier, consider the following best practices:

Spread FAST VP SSDs across all available buses.

Avoid using enclosure 0_0.

• Pool capacity utilization and configuration best practices:

Maintain some unallocated capacity within the pool to help with relocation schedules when using FAST VP.

Relocation will reclaim 10 percent free capacity per tier. This space is used to optimize relocation operations but also helps when new LUNs are created that want to use the higher tiers.

• Relocation best practices:

Schedule relocations for off-peak hours so the primary workload does not contend with the relocation activity.

Enable FAST VP on a pool, even if the pool has only one tier, to provide ongoing load balancing of the LUNs across the available drives.

• VNX for file considerations and best practices:

By default, a VNX for file system-defined storage pool is created for every VNX for block storage pool that contains LUNs available to file. (This is a mapped storage pool.)

All LUNs in a given file storage pool should have the same FAST VP tiering policy.

Create a user-defined storage pool to separate the file LUNs from the same block storage pools that have different tiering policies.

When planning, use the Continuous Availability feature with the storage availability in mind for business-critical SharePoint instances.

• SharePoint specific FAST VP configuration:

For a medium to large SharePoint farm, EMC recommends that you enable FAST VP on the SharePoint content database pool to aggressively reduce TCO. The percentage of the reduced TCO can vary widely, depending on the

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Design Guide

size of the SharePoint farm and the workload in this farm. In our lab, the average percentage of the reduced TCO is about 22%. The SharePoint workload can be serviced with a mix of tiers and a much lower drive count. Table 20 demonstrates details of this mixed pool after FAST VP is enabled. For detailed configuration and reduced TCO information, refer to Appendix C: VSPEX Sizing Tool for Virtualized SharePoint.

Put the database log file for the content databases in the RAID 10 SharePoint services pool.

Table 20. Disk type and RAID type for storage pool after FAST VP is enabled

Storage pool name RAID type Disk type

Content database pool RAID 6 NL-SAS

RAID 10 FAST VP SSD

For more information, refer to the best practices in EMC FAST VP for Unified Storage Systems White Paper.

FAST Cache design best practices

You can use FAST VP in combination with other performance optimization software, such as FAST Cache. A common strategy is to use FAST VP to gain TCO benefits while using FAST Cache to boost overall system performance. EMC recommends that you use the available flash drives first for FAST Cache, which can globally benefit all LUNs in the storage system, and then supplement performance as needed with additional flash drives in the storage pool tiers.

When using flash drives as FAST Cache, consider the following best practices:

• Place all flash drives (up to eight drives) in enclosure 0_0. If you have more than eight drives, consider the following:

Spread flash drives across all available buses.

Mirror drives within one enclosure, to avoid mirroring across enclosure 0_0.

• Preferred application workloads for FAST Cache are as follows:

Small-block random I/O applications with high locality

High frequency of access to the same data

Systems where current performance is limited by HDD capability, not Storage Processor (SP) capability

• Avoid enabling FAST Cache for LUNs that are not expected to benefit, such as when:

The primary workload is sequential

The primary workload is large-block I/O

• Avoid enabling FAST Cache for LUNs where the workload is small-block sequential, including database logs.

• FAST Cache can improve overall system performance if the current bottleneck is drive-related. However, boosting the IOPS will result in an increase in CPU

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utilization on the VNX SPs. Systems should be sized so that the maximum sustained utilization is 70 percent.

• Use Unisphere to check the SP CPU utilization and then proceed as follows:

SP CPU utilization less than 60 percent: Enable groups of LUNs or one pool at a time until they are equalized in the cache. Ensure that the SP CPU utilization is still acceptable before turning on FAST Cache for more LUNs/pools.

SP CPU utilization of 60 to 80 percent: Scale in carefully. Enable FAST Cache on one or two LUNs at a time, and verify that the SP CPU utilization does not go above 80 percent.

SP CPU utilization greater than 80 percent: Do not activate FAST Cache.

• Avoid enabling FAST Cache for a group of LUNs where the aggregate LUN capacity exceeds 20 times the total FAST Cache capacity.

• Enable FAST Cache on a subset of the LUNs first, and enable the LUNs to be equalized before adding the other LUNs.

Note: For storage pools, FAST Cache is a pool-wide feature so you have to enable or disable at the pool level for all LUNs in the pool.

This section presents three example storage layouts in this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint—one of a farm for VNXe, layered on a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, and the other two for VNX, layered on a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure with and without FAST VP for the SharePoint content database pool. All of these examples follow the best practices and design considerations previously discussed.

Storage layout examples

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Design Guide

Figure 11 shows an example of the storage layout in the SharePoint farm for the VNXe series.

Figure 11. Storage layout example: SharePoint 2013 small farm for the VNXe series

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Figure 12 shows an example of the storage layout in the SharePoint farm for the VNX series without FAST VP enabled.

Figure 12. Storage layout example: SharePoint 2013 medium farm for VNX series without FAST VP

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Design Guide

Figure 13 shows an example of the storage layout in the SharePoint medium farm for the VNX series with FAST VP enabled.

Figure 13. Storage layout example: SharePoint 2013 medium farm for VNX with FAST VP

Note: These are examples of storage layouts. To plan and design your own storage layouts for SharePoint over a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, follow the guidance in the VSPEX Sizing Tool and the best practices in Storage layouts and design considerations.

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Virtualization design considerations

SharePoint Server 2013 is fully supported when you deploy it in a virtual environment that is supported by Hyper-V technology or VMware vSphere ESXi technology. The following sections describe the best practices and design considerations for SharePoint Server 2013 virtualization.

In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint, EMC recommends that you consider the following best practices for virtualization design.

• Virtualize the web servers and application servers. Operating in a virtual environment gives you the flexibility to reallocate resources across virtual machines as necessary to tune performance. You can also add and remove virtual servers more easily to address spikes in the usage of specific services that occur at predictable times throughout the year.

Application servers are good candidates for virtualization. For these, the resource requirements can differ depending on the degree of specialization, which is reflected by the services they provide, they do not always have low resource requirements. A good example is a SharePoint application server that hosts the search crawl component. In this solution, EMC recommends that application servers that host search crawl components should have 12 cores, while application servers that host other service applications should have four cores. Table 21 demonstrates the recommended number of vCPUs for the application server, based on the purpose of the application server.

Table 21. Recommended number of vCPUs for the application server

Purpose of the application server Recommended number of vCPUs

Application server with search crawler 12 cores

Application server with other service applications

4 cores

• Virtualize SQL Server. The database role is responsible for storing, maintaining, and returning data to the other roles in the farm. This role has the highest amount of disk I/O activity and can often have very high memory and processor requirements. There is high value in the ability to simply migrate the SQL Server application to higher-powered servers or provide greater resourcing through virtualization.

• Set the proper number of vCPU cores for the SQL Server virtual machine. The number of vCPU cores for SQL Server is related to the total number of users in the SharePoint farm.

Overview

Virtualization design best practices

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Design Guide

Table 22 demonstrates the recommended number of vCPUs for different ranges of total users.

Table 22. Recommended number of vCPUs for SQL Server

Total number of users Recommended number of vCPUs for SQL Server

Fewer than 1,000 users 4 cores

Between 1,000 and 10,000 users 8 cores or 16 cores

Note: In a large SharePoint farm with five web servers, EMC recommends that you have 16 cores for virtualized SQL Server to keep the CPU utilization of SQL Server in the Green Zone.

• Set the proper amount of memory for the SQL Server virtual machine. The memory required for SharePoint Server 2013 is directly related to the size of the content databases that you are hosting on the server running SQL Server. Table 23 demonstrates the RAM recommended for virtual machines running SQL Server, based on the combined size of the content databases.

Table 23. Recommended RAM for SQL Server

Total number of users RAM recommended for virtual machines running SQL Server

Fewer than 1,000 users 8 GB

Between 1,000 and 10,000 users 16 GB

• Maximize the overall throughput by mixing the farm server roles on each host. For example, you can reduce disk contention by mixing web servers with application servers because they usually do not write to disk at the same time.

• Spread the same SharePoint server role across different hosts. For example, you may have several web servers in a medium SharePoint farm. In this scenario, for redundancy considerations, EMC recommends that you spread these web servers across different hosts.

• In VMware vSphere, enable the vSphere HA, DRS, and vMotion functions. If you select vSphere as your hypervisor, enable the vSphere HA, DRS, and vMotion functions on the ESXi servers to provide basic availability and scalability. EMC recommends that you spread the SharePoint roles across different ESXi hosts.

The vSphere DRS function can automatically balance the workload between the hosts by using the vMotion function. When SharePoint workloads increase, DRS automatically moves a bottlenecked virtual machine to another host with more available resources, without downtime.

After you enable the DRS function, consider using DRS affinity and anti-affinity rules. EMC recommends that you use DRS affinity and anti-affinity rules for specific groups of virtual machines (for example, a group of web servers) that should never reside on the same host. DRS also enables the grouping of virtual machines by a common name and restricting their execution to a specific

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subset of hosts. For detailed steps on how to configure DRS, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

• In Hyper-V, enable the Hyper-V high availability and Live Migration functions. Enabling Hyper-V with System Center and integrating with System Center Operations Manager enables you to monitor the resource utilization of the Hyper-V hosts and virtual machines and can automatically balance resource utilization by using Live Migration to move virtual machines with no downtime.

When you want to enable the dynamic rebalancing function, ensure that the dynamic rebalancing is not too aggressive as this can cause performance issues with constant Live Migration.

• Monitor the performance of your whole VSPEX Proven infrastructure regularly. Monitoring performance not only happens at the virtual machine level, but also at the hypervisor level. For example, when the hypervisor is ESXi, you can use performance monitoring inside the SharePoint virtual machine to ensure virtual machine or SharePoint performance. Meanwhile, at the hypervisor level, you can use esxtop to monitor host performance. For detailed information on the performance monitoring tools, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

Application design considerations

Design considerations for SharePoint Server 2013 involve many aspects. The best practice and design considerations in this section provide guidelines for the most common and important ones.

SQL Server 2012 for SharePoint Server 2013

In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint, EMC recommends that you consider the following best practices for the SharePoint 2013 farm design:

• To ensure optimal performance for farm operations, EMC recommends that you install SQL Server 2012 on a dedicated server that does not run other farm roles and does not host databases for other applications.

• Do not enable AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS on a server that hosts SQL Server and SharePoint Server. Enabling AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS is not supported for SharePoint Server. SharePoint Server configures the required settings during provisioning and upgrade. Manually enabling AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS on a SharePoint database can significantly change the execution plan of a query. The SharePoint databases either use a stored procedure that maintains the statistics (proc_UpdateStatistics) or rely on SQL Server to do this.

• Set the maximum degree of parallelism (MAXDOP) option to 1 for SQL Server instances hosting SharePoint Server 2013 databases, to ensure that each request is served by a single SQL Server process. For detailed steps, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

• For best performance, place the tempdb system database on a RAID 10-capable array. In this solution, EMC recommends that you use a minimum of two

Overview

Application design best practices

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Design Guide

tempdb data files for the small SharePoint farm and a minimum of four data files for the medium SharePoint farm.

• Set the database autogrowth values as a percentage instead of a fixed number of megabytes. The bigger the database, the bigger the growth increment should be. Consider, for example, that we used 10 percent autogrowth for the SharePoint databases. For detailed steps, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

• EMC recommends that you continuously monitor SQL Server storage and performance to make sure that each production database server is adequately handling its load. For more information, refer to the MSDN Library topic Monitoring SQL Server Performance.

• Use the full recovery model for the SharePoint content database and the simple recovery model for the SharePoint services database:

The full recovery model enables administrators to back up the transaction logs incrementally. It enables recovery of the SharePoint content database from a specific point in time from log backup, even if the data files of the content databases are corrupt. EMC recommends that you monitor the growth of the log file and take log backups regularly for the full recovery model.

The simple recovery model automatically reclaims log space to keep the space requirement small, essentially eliminating the need to manage the transaction log space. However, simple recovery does not support log backups.

For detailed configuration steps, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

SharePoint Server 2013 Publishing Portal

In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, EMC suggests that you use caching to the Publishing Portal for better performance in the SharePoint farm. Caching can provide big benefits in a publishing site. Be sure to use the appropriate caching type. When used correctly, caching can significantly improve the throughput and user response time. You can configure the following cache types:

• Output cache: Stores the rendered output of a page. It also stores different versions of the cached page, based on the permissions of the users who are requesting the page.

• Object cache: Reduces the traffic between the web server and the SQL database by storing objects such as lists and libraries, site settings, and page layouts in memory on the front-end web server. As a result, the pages that require these items can be rendered quickly, increasing the speed with which pages are delivered to the client browser.

• Binary large object (BLOB) cache: Disk-based cache that controls the caching for BLOBs, such as frequently used image, audio, and video files, and other files that are used to display web pages, such as CSS and JS files. The BLOB cache is enabled on a front-end web server and improves performance by retrieving BLOB files from the database and storing them in a directory on the front-end web end server where they are served to users. This reduces the network traffic to and the load on the database server.

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• Anonymous search results cache: Used primarily by publishing sites that allow access by anonymous users. The anonymous search results cache saves search results from anonymous users and reuses them for later queries that are the same as the original query.

For more information, refer to the article Plan for caching and performance in SharePoint Server 2013 on the Microsoft TechNet website. For detailed steps on creating a SharePoint 2013 Publishing Portal, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

SharePoint Server 2013 Document Management Portal

If you have a huge number of items such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations stored in the SharePoint Document Library, EMC recommends that you create very large document libraries by either nesting folders or using standard views and site hierarchy.

SharePoint Server 2013 supports high-capacity document storage. A document library can contain millions of documents. However, depending on how the content is used, the performance of sites that contain many documents can decrease. If you are planning a large-scale content management solution, refer to the article Plan document management in SharePoint 2013 on the Microsoft TechNet website.

For detailed steps on creating a SharePoint 2013 Document Management Portal, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

SharePoint Server 2013 Search Service

Before you design your SharePoint search topology in a farm, it is important for you to understand the search concepts described in Appendix B: SharePoint Server 2013 Concepts.

The SharePoint Server 2013 Search Service contains a richer set of features and a more flexible topology model than earlier versions. Consider the following best practices before you implement your search topology:

• The index temporary location resides in the SharePoint application servers that host the crawler component.

Table 24 details an example of the I/O pattern of this component, showing that the IOPS is high and the read and write size is large. In this situation, EMC recommends that you change its default location (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Data\) to the SharePoint services pool, which is RAID 10. For details on how to change this location, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

Table 24. Example I/O pattern of the index temporary location in SharePoint Server 2013

IOPS Read:Write Read size (KB) Write size (KB)

410 2:3 129 90

• Scale out the query and crawl components to multiple partitions for load balancing. EMC recommends that you place the query components load on different servers to distribute the load.

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• If the number of items to crawl is up to 10 million items, all search roles can co-exist on one nonredundant server or on two servers.

• If the number of items to crawl is up to40 million items, add:

One crawl database per 20 million items

One index partition per 10 million items

Up to two query processing components

• To optimize your crawl performance, consider creating more crawl components or adding more application servers for crawl.

• Redirect all crawl traffic to the application server in the SharePoint farm. This prevents the crawler from using the same resources that are being used to render and serve web pages and content to active users.

By default, the SharePoint Server 2013 crawler crawls all available web servers in a SharePoint farm through the network load balancer in that farm. Therefore, when a crawl is occurring, the crawler can cause increased network traffic, increased usage of the storage and processor resources on the web servers, and increased usage of the resources on the database servers. Putting this additional load on all web servers at the same time can decrease performance across the SharePoint farm.

For detailed steps on search topology configuration, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

Backup and recovery design considerations

All VSPEX solutions are sized and tested with EMC backup and recovery products, including Avamar and Data Domain. If your solution includes backup and recovery components, refer to EMC Backup and Recovery Options for VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Design and Implementation Guide for detailed information on implementing your backup and recovery solution.

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Chapter 6: Solution Verification Methodologies


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Chapter 6 Solution Verification Methodologies


Overview .................................................................................................................. 72

Baseline hardware verification methodology ........................................................... 72

Application verification methodology ...................................................................... 72

Backup and recovery verification methodology ........................................................ 77

Test tools ................................................................................................................. 77

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This chapter describes the following methodologies used to verify the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution:

• Baseline hardware verification methodology

• Application verification methodology

• Backup and recovery verification methodology

Baseline hardware verification methodology

Hardware consists of the computer's physical resources such as processors, memory, and storage. Hardware also includes physical network components such as NICs, cables, switches, routers, and hardware load balancers. You can avoid many performance and capacity issues by using the correct hardware for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution. Conversely, a single misapplication of a hardware resource, such as insufficient memory on a server, can affect performance across the entire farm.

For detailed steps on verifying the redundancy of the solution components, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

Application verification methodology

After you verify the hardware and the redundancy of the solution components, the next stage is SharePoint application testing and optimization, which is also a critical step of the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution. Test the new VSPEX Proven Infrastructure before deploying it to production to ensure the architectures you designed achieve the required performance and capacity targets. This enables you to identify and optimize potential bottlenecks before they negatively impact users in a live deployment.

Before you start verifying your SharePoint performance on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, make sure you have deployed SharePoint 2013 in your VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, based on the VSPEX Implementation Guides.

Table 25 describes the high-level steps to complete before you put the SharePoint environment into production.

Table 25. High-level steps for application verification

Step Description Reference

1 Define the test scenarios (as noted in the VSPEX Sizing Tool) to demonstrate your real-world business workload.

Defining the test scenarios

2 Understand the key metrics for your SharePoint environment to achieve performance and capacity that meet your business requirements.


Overview

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3 Use the VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint to determine the architecture and resources of your VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

VSPEX Proven Infrastructure partner portal

4 Design and build the SharePoint solution on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

VSPEX Implementation Guides

5 Create the test environment using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS).

Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server

6 Populate or copy data from an old production environment to demonstrate a real-world environment.

Test tools for database population

7 Run the tests, analyze the results, and optimize your VSPEX architecture.

Test tools for database population

Before running a SharePoint test, it is important that you define the test scenarios according to the business requirements. You can easily work out your own test scenarios and test plans with the VSPEX Sizing Tool.

The key factors we considered in the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 test scenarios are:

• Operations: Define the different operations that end users perform in the SharePoint website. Understanding these key operations helps you to demonstrate a real environment test. Table 26 lists some of the general operations we considered in the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution.

Table 26. General operations

Operation Description

Browse • Browse the SharePoint page, including the home page.

• Access a document library list view page.

Modify • Download a random document in SharePoint (for example, DOC, DOCX, PPT, or XLS).

• Edit and update the properties of the document.

Search Search for keywords in the SharePoint search portal.

Document upload Upload a document to SharePoint.

• Workload: Define the key operational characteristics of the farm, including the user base, concurrency, the features being used, and the user agents or client applications that are used to connect with the farm. Understanding your expected demand and usage characteristics enables you to verify your environment more accurately, and reduces the risk when constantly running the

Defining the test scenarios

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system in the production environment. Table 27 lists some of mixed workloads considered in the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution.

Table 27. Mixed workloads

Mixed workload Scenario % in the mix

Publishing Portal:

The operations mainly focus on page browse.

Browse 80

Modify 10

Search 10

Document Management Portal:

Document activities are typically 30%.

Browse 50

Modify 20

Search 20

Document upload 10

• Operational states: The load of a production system has two major operational states—the Green Zone state, in which the system is operating under the normal, expected load range, and the Red Zone state, in which the farm experiences very high, transient resource demand that can only be sustained for limited periods. In the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution, we specified the Green Zone and Red Zone with the following criteria:

Green Zone:

− All the operations were completed in less than 3 seconds.

− All SharePoint servers have a CPU utilization of less than 70 percent; all the SQL servers have a CPU utilization of less than 50 percent.

− Failure rate is less than 0.01 percent.

Red Zone:

− All the operations were completed in less than 3 seconds.

− All SharePoint servers have a CPU utilization of less than 90 percent; all the SQL Server instances have a CPU utilization of less than 70 percent.

− Failure rate is less than 0.1 percent.

Note: During a search crawl, it is acceptable for the CPU utilization and disk response time to exceed the stated SLAs for a temporary period of time.

In addition to the test scenarios, it is important to know the goal of the SharePoint testing to make it easier to decide which metrics to capture and what thresholds must be met for each metric when running the SharePoint tests. To verify the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution, we considered the following key metrics:

• Requests per second (RPS): This is also known as Passed Tests per Second in the VSTS test. RPS is the number of operations received by a farm or server in one second. Most tests are based on RPS, which can tell you how many requests the SharePoint farm can service in a given period of time. RPS can be


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used for measuring how many pages or documents are delivered, uploaded, or modified, and how many queries are executed.

This is a common measurement of the server and farm load. For more information about how RPS is calculated, refer to Appendix C: RPS calculation methodology.

• Operation duration: The length of time it takes to complete a user request (SharePoint operation). Different organizations define different goals, based on their business requirements and user expectations. Some organizations can afford a latency of several seconds, whereas other organizations require very fast transactions. In the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution, the default response time for each common SharePoint user operation to be completed is three seconds or less.

Note: Microsoft publishes SLA response times for each SharePoint user operation. Common operations (such as browse and search) should be completed within three seconds or less, and uncommon operations (such as modify) should be completed within five seconds or less. These response-time SLAs were comfortably met or exceeded.

The VSPEX Sizing Tool helps you to understand the basic metrics and thresholds to meet your customer’s business requirement.

When you have decided the test objectives, defined the measurements, and determined what the capacity requirements are for your farm, the next objective is to design and create the test environment for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution. The test farm should duplicate the production environment as closely as possible. You should consider all the features previously described, for example: storage layout, network load balance, networking, and so on.

In the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution, we used VSTS in conjunction with code to simulate real-world SharePoint user activity. For more information about the sample performance test code, refer to Sample code for SharePoint performance testing. When you set up your test environment, you need to create a test plan for the servers in the SharePoint Server 2013 farm, and also for the machines needed to execute the tests. Generally, more of the machines are used as load test agents. The agents are the machines that take instructions from the test controller about what to test, and issue requests to the SharePoint Server 2013 farm. The test results themselves are stored on a SQL Server-based computer. For more information about VSTS, refer to the Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server topic at the MSDN Library.

In addition to the test environment and test tool, you may also need to use some other tools to prepare the whole test environment for SharePoint. For more information on tools, refer to EMC Backup and Recovery Options for VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Design and Implementation Guide. Also, refer to the Microsoft TechNet website for more information about building the test environment for SharePoint.

After the test environment is created, you need to decide what type of data you are going to run. If you do not have any production environment data, refer to Backup and

Creating the test environment

Populating the database

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recovery verification methodology for the general data population tool to demonstrate a customer environment. EMC recommends that you use data from an existing production farm and restore it to the VSPEX SharePoint environment. If you run tests against made-up or sample data that is different from your real content, you run the risk of skewed test results.

After the database is populated and the test environment is created, run the tests based on the designed test scenarios using VSTS. With Visual Studio Team Test Load Agent, you can configure the browser mix, network mix, load patterns, and run settings for different workloads in the web tests.

We followed these general best practices in the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution:

• Do not use the think time feature. Think time is a VSTS feature that enables you to simulate the time that users pause between clicks on a page. For example, a typical user might load a page, spend three minutes reading it, and then click a link on the page to visit another site. Trying to model this in a test environment is nearly impossible to do correctly, so it does not add value to the test results. Modeling is difficult because most organizations do not have the ability to monitor different users and the time they spend between clicks on different types of SharePoint sites (such as publishing or search or collaboration). Furthermore, using the think time does not add value because even though users may pause between page requests, the SharePoint Server 2013-based servers do not.

• Use a goal-based load pattern in the VSTS test for the Green Zone test. A goal-based usage test is when you establish a threshold for a certain diagnostic counter, like CPU utilization, and test attempts to drive the load to keep that counter between the minimum and maximum thresholds that you defined. If you want to understand your general throughput for the VSPEX SharePoint environment in a normal situation, use goal-based load pattern tests to establish a threshold for the CPU utilization of the SharePoint Server. For more information about different patterns, refer to the Running Load and Web Performance Tests topic at the MSDN Library.

• Once a test is complete, you can use the Visual Studio Analyzer to check the results and verify that you have achieved the key metrics in your test environment. If the test results are not ideal, it is easy to identify the bottleneck using different tools. For detailed information about tools, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

• After identifying potential bottlenecks, refer to VSPEX Proven Infrastructure Guides to make sure that you have the correct configuration of VNXe/VNX, switches, hypervisor, or load balancer for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution. System bottlenecks represent a point of contention where there are insufficient resources to service user transaction requests. Consider adding more resources into the solution to meet the requirement. Often, the reason for the bottleneck will be inefficient custom code or third-party solutions due to customization.

For detailed configuration information, refer to VSPEX Implementation Guides.

Running tests, analyzing results, and optimization

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Backup and recovery verification methodology

All VSPEX solutions are sized and tested with EMC backup and recovery, including EMC Avamar and EMC Data Domain. If your solution includes backup and recovery components, refer to EMC Backup and Recovery Options for VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Design and Implementation Guide for detailed information on verifying the functionality and performance of your backup and recovery solution.

Test tools

In this VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution, we used the Bulk Loader tool to create unique documents. This command-line tool, written using the Microsoft .NET 4.0 Framework, can create unique documents based on a Wikipedia dump file. The utility enables you to create up to 10 million unique Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and HTML files of various sizes so you can load different content types of different sizes directly into the SharePoint 2013 Document Libraries. This tool uses a dump file of Wikipedia content as input to allow the creation of up to 10 million unique documents to a disk location.

For more information on the bulk loader tool, refer to the Bulk Loader—Create Unique Documents based on Wikipedia Dump File topic at the MSDN Library.

In this VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution, we used the LoadBulk2SP tool to load documents into the SharePoint Server. The tool was written using C# and the Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework to be compatible with SharePoint Server. This tool takes the Bulk Loader tool disk output files as input for loading directly into the SharePoint Server, mimicking the same folder and file structure, and using the targeted web applications and document libraries specified in the application configuration.

For more information on the LoadBulk2SP tool, refer to the Load Bulk Content to SharePoint 2010 topic at the MSDN Library.

In this VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution, we used sample project in Visual Studio 2010 to provide load and stress testing for search, document download, and view pages scenarios. Refer to the sample project in SharePoint Performance Testing at the MSDN library and customize in your own VSPEX solution to validate the SharePoint 2013 performance.

Sample tool to create large number of random documents

Sample tool to load documents into SharePoint

Sample code for SharePoint performance testing

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Chapter 7: Reference Documentation


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Chapter 7 Reference Documentation


EMC documentation ................................................................................................. 80

Other documentation ............................................................................................... 80

Links ........................................................................................................................ 81

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The following documents, available from the EMC Online Support or EMC.com websites, provide additional and relevant information. If you do not have access to a document, contact your EMC representative.

• EMC Unisphere Remote: Next-Generation Storage Monitoring A Detailed Review

• EMC FAST VP for Unified Storage Systems

• EMC VNXe Series Using a VNXe System with Microsoft Windows Hyper-V

• EMC VNXe Series Using a VNXe System with NFS Shared Folders

• EMC VNX Unified Best Practices for Performance Applied Best Practices Guide

• EMC VNXe Series Configuration Worksheet

• EMC VNX Series Configuration Worksheet

• EMC VSI for VMware vSphere: Storage Viewer Product Guide

• EMC VSI for VMware vSphere: Unified Storage Management Product Guide

• EMC VNX Host Connectivity Guide for VMware ESX Server

• EMC VNX Operating Environment for File Release Notes Version

• EMC Backup and Recovery Options for VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Design and Implementation Guide

• VSPEX with EMC Backup and Recovery for Private Cloud and End User Computing Solutions Design and Implementation Guide

Other documentation

For documentation on Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft SharePoint, visit the Microsoft website. For documentation on VMware vSphere, visit the VMware website.

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Links

Refer to the following articles on the Microsoft TechNet website:

• Performance and capacity test results and recommendations (SharePoint Server 2013)

• Configure cache settings for a web application in SharePoint Server 2013

Refer to the following topics in the MSDN Library:

• Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server

• Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server

• Bulk Loader—Create Unique Documents based on Wikipedia Dump File

• Load Bulk Content to SharePoint 2010

• SharePoint Performance Testing

• Running Load and Web Performance Tests

Note: The links provided were working correctly at the time of publication.

Microsoft TechNet

MSDN Library

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Appendix A Qualification Worksheet

This appendix presents the following topic:

VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet .............................. 84

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VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet

Before sizing the VSPEX solution, use the qualification worksheet to gather information about the customer’s business requirements. Table 28 shows the qualification worksheet for virtualized SharePoint 2013.

Table 28. VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint 2013 qualification worksheet

Question Answer

How many SharePoint 2013 farms do you plan to host in your VSPEX Proven Infrastructure?

Included number of years’ growth?

SharePoint 2013 Farm 1

Annual growth rate (%)?

Is the SharePoint Web application going to be accessed globally? Yes or No

Initial farm size (GB)?

Number of users?

User concurrency at peak (%)?

What is the main purpose of the SharePoint Web application? Publishing Portal or Document Management Portal

Do you use or intend to use the MySites function? Yes or No

What is the percentage of total users who will create MySites?


Do you intend to enable FAST VP? Yes or No

Do you heavily rely on the RELY ON THE SHAREPOINT SharePoint search function?

Yes or No





Number of users?







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Question Answer

Do you heavily rely on the SharePoint search function? Yes or No





Number of users?







Do you heavily rely on SharePoint search function? Yes or No

A standalone copy of the qualification worksheet is attached to this document in PDF format. To view and print the worksheet:

1. In Adobe Reader, open the Attachments panel as follows:

Select View > Show/Hide > Navigation Panes > Attachments.

or

Click the Attachments icon as shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14. Printable qualification worksheet

2. In the Attachments panel, double-click the attached file to open and print the qualification worksheet.

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Appendix B SharePoint Server 2013 Concepts


SharePoint Server 2013 fundamentals ..................................................................... 88

SharePoint Server 2013 search service .................................................................... 89

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SharePoint Server 2013 fundamentals

Review the key SharePoint Server 2013 concepts listed in Table 29. It is important that you fully understand these key concepts.

Table 29. SharePoint Server 2013 fundamental concepts

Concept Description

Server farm The top-level element of a logical architecture design for SharePoint Server.

Web application An IIS website that is created and used by SharePoint Server 2013.

Web application is an integration of SharePoint and ASP.NET which makes sure SharePoint takes control over every request that reaches IIS.

Content database Provides web application content storage. You can also have multiple content databases in a web application.

Read and write characteristics depend on the user profile: the Publishing Portal is read-intensive; the Document Management Portal could be write-intensive.

Site collection A set of websites that have the same owner and share administration settings.

Site One or more related web pages and other items (such as lists, libraries, and documents) that are hosted inside a site collection.

Service applications A service application provides a resource that can be shared across sites within a farm or, in some cases, across multiple farms.

MySites MySites are special SharePoint site collections that contain profile information about a user, links to content created by a user and stored in SharePoint databases, and information about the people, interests, and activities a user is tracking.

Publishing Portal A starter site collection that can be used for an Internet site or a large intranet portal. The site includes a home page, sample press releases site, search center, and log-in page. Typically, this site has many more readers than contributors, and it uses approval workflows to publish the web pages.

Document Management Portal

A site collection in which you can centrally manage and collaborate on documents in your organization.

Figure 15 shows the basic content structure in a SharePoint Server 2013 farm. In the SharePoint farm, you can create multiple web applications to host IIS websites with different URLs. For each web application, you can have multiple content databases. You can create different site collections in one content database, including the Publishing Portal or Document Management Portal. Each site collection can have multiple sites with different lists and document libraries to store list items and different types of documents.

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Figure 15. SharePoint Server 2013 content structure

SharePoint Server 2013 search service

Table 30 lists the key concepts of the SharePoint search service. It is important to understand these concepts before designing the SharePoint search function.

Table 30. SharePoint search service concepts

Concept Description

Search service application

A search service application provides the search function to end users to search across the sites in the farm, or even across multiple farms.

Crawling Collects the content to be processed.

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Concept Description

Indexing Organizes the processed content into a structured or searchable index.

Query processing Retrieves a relevant result set relative to a given user query.

Crawl component Crawls the content sources to collect crawled properties and metadata from the crawled items and sends this information to the content processing component.

Content processing component

Transforms the crawled items and sends them to the index component. This component also maps crawled properties to managed properties and interacts with the analytics processing component.

Analytics processing component

Analyzes the crawled items and how users interact with the search results. The analyses are used to improve the search relevance and to create search reports and recommendations.

Index component Receives the processed items from the content processing component and writes them to the search index. This component also handles incoming queries, retrieves information from the search index, and sends back the result set to the query processing component.

Query processing component

Analyzes incoming queries. This helps to optimize precision, recall, and relevance. The queries are sent to the index component, which returns a set of search results for the query.

Search administration component

Runs the system processes for search, and adds and initializes new instances of search components.

Search administration database

The search administration database stores search configuration data and the access control list (ACL) for the crawl component. There can be only one search administration database per search service application.

Analytics reporting database

Stores the results of usage analysis, such as the number of times an item has been viewed. It also stores statistics from the different analyses. These statistics are used to create usage reports.

Crawl database The crawl database stores tracking information and details about crawled items. For example, it stores information about the last crawl time, the last crawl ID, and the type of update during the last crawl.

Link database The link database stores information extracted by the content processing component. It also stores information about the number of times people have clicked on a search result. The information is stored unprocessed; the analytics processing component performs the analysis.

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Appendix C: VSPEX Sizing Tool for Virtualized SharePoint


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Appendix C VSPEX Sizing Tool for Virtualized SharePoint


RPS calculation methodology .................................................................................. 92

Estimating content database size ............................................................................ 92

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RPS calculation methodology

In the VSPEX Sizing Tool, one of the key metrics is requests per second (RPS). Most tests are based on RPS, which can tell you how many requests the SharePoint farm can service in a given period of time. RPS can be used for measuring how many pages or documents are delivered, uploaded, or modified, and how many queries are executed.

RPS is calculated automatically after customers complete the qualification worksheet in the VSPEX Sizing Tool. The formula is:

Total RPS = Active User * Heavy User Load

“Active User” means the average number of active users at any point in time. In cases where the distribution of the users is worldwide, we assume that only half of the total number of users is active due to the time-zone gap.

SharePoint site users can be classified into four groups:

• Light users generate 20 requests per hour or 2 user operations per hour (user ops/hour).

• Typical users generate 36 requests per hour or 3.6 user ops/hour.

• Heavy users generate 60 requests per hour or 6 user ops/hour.

• Extreme users generate 120 requests per hour or 12 user ops/hour.

In the VSPEX Sizing Tool, we used a heavy users profile as an assumption, which is suitable for most user scenarios.

For example, if you get the following answers from a customer:

Question Answer

Is the SharePoint Web application going to be accessed globally? Yes


User concurrency at peak (%)? 20%

Then, the total RPS is:

Total RPS = 10,000 * 0.5 * 20% * 60/3600 = 17

Estimating content database size

If it is your first time using a SharePoint farm, you might need to estimate your content database storage size.

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The questionnaire in Table 31 describes how to estimate the content database size.

Table 31. Formula to estimate content database size

Question Answer

Number of documents?

Refer to D in the formula.

For the Document Management Portal and Publishing Portal, you can calculate the number of documents that are managed and generated by a process.

If you are migrating from a current system, it may be easier to extrapolate your current growth rate and usage. If you are creating a new system, review your existing file shares or other repositories and estimate based on that usage rate.

Average size of documents?

Refer to S in the formula.

It may be worthwhile to estimate averages for different types or groups of sites. The average file size for document management or publishing portals can vary significantly.

List Items?

Refer to L in the formula.

List items are more difficult to estimate than documents. We generally use an estimate of three times the number of documents (D), but this will vary based on how you expect to use your sites.

Number of noncurrent versions?

Refer to V in the formula.

Estimate the average number of versions any document in a library will have (this value will usually be much lower than the maximum allowed number of versions).

After you complete the questionnaire, use the following formula to estimate the size of your content databases:

Database size = ((D × V) × S) + (10 KB × (L + (V × D)))

For example, if you get the following answers from a customer:

Question Answer

Number of documents (D) 200,000

Average size of documents (S) 500 KB

List Items (L) 50,000

Number of non-current versions (V) 2

Then, the database size is:

Database size = (((200,000 x 2)) × 500) + ((10 KB × (50,000 + (200,000 x 2))) = 204,500,000 KB or 195 GB

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Appendix D: High-level SharePoint Server 2013 Sizing Logic and Methodology


Design Guide

Appendix D High-level SharePoint Server 2013 Sizing Logic and Methodology


Overview .................................................................................................................. 96

SharePoint topology and compute resource sizing .................................................. 97

Storage layout sizing for SharePoint Server 2013 .................................................. 101

Selecting the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure .................................................... 108

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Overview

This section describes how to size the SharePoint Server 2013 farm environment on an EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. Sizing SharePoint Server 2013 depends on multiple factors, such as farm purpose, user access load, service application load, and capacity. These factors can affect the farm topology and storage layer design.

Table 32 details the steps to size SharePoint Server 2013 for the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Table 32. High-level steps for SharePoint farm sizing


1 Determine the SharePoint topology based on the customer’s requirement, including the:

• Number of web server roles and required compute resources

• Number of application server roles and required compute resources

• Database server compute resource sizing

SharePoint topology and compute resource sizing

2 Determine the storage requirement for a SharePoint farm based on the customer’s need, including:

• VSPEX private cloud pool

• Content database pool storage layout

• Services pool storage layout

• MySite pool storage layout

Storage layout sizing for SharePoint Server 2013

3 If the customer has more than one SharePoint farm on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, repeat Step 1 and Step 2 to size all the SharePoint farms. In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, we supported a maximum of three SharePoint farms on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

4 If customer has other applications to be deployed on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, refer to the appropriate Design Guide to size the other applications.

VSPEX Proven Infrastructure partner portal

5 Aggregate all the required resources and select the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Selecting the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure

Note: If the VSPEX Sizing Tool is not available, these manual sizing instructions can be used to provide an approximate single application sizing. The VSPEX Sizing Tool, with its multi-application, multi-instance capability is recommended as the preferred sizing approach.

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Design Guide

SharePoint topology and compute resource sizing

The SharePoint farm comprises SharePoint servers with different roles. Topology sizing and design considers how to distribute the roles on a certain number of servers. With a good topology design, compute resources are appropriately distributed and the customer’s requirement for the SharePoint application is better satisfied. This section introduces a high-level view of sizing the SharePoint farm topology and compute resources.

Servers in the SharePoint farm have three roles: web server, application server, and database server. EMC recommends that you size the web server first, and then use the result to help size the application server before finally sizing the database server.

The web server directly manages users’ requests, handling the basic process and rendering the information required by the user. When necessary, it passes requests to the back-end application servers for further processing. The role that the web server plays helps you to start sizing of the farm.

The qualification sheet contains the information needed to size the farm. To determine the number of web servers for the SharePoint farm, you need to know:

• The number of users

• The percentage of user concurrency at peak

• If the farm is accessed globally

• The main purpose of the web application (publishing or document management)

The answers to these questions help you to figure out the maximum active user number. The formula for calculating the active user number is:

Active user number = Number of users * User concurrency (need to /2 if it is global)

Web applications with different purposes have different access characteristics, which can result in varying web server resource consumption. For example, in our VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, we used the numbers in Table 33 to define the relationship between the number of active users and the number of web servers.

Table 33. Sizing the web server by active user number

Main purpose of web application

Number of active users Number of web servers

Publishing portal Less than 120 1 (web server with application server in one box)

From 120 to 750 1

From 751 to 1,506 2

From 1,507 to 2,948 3

From 2,949 to 3,785 4

SharePoint Server 2013 web server sizing

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Main purpose of web application

Number of active users Number of web servers

From 3,786 to 4,528 5

Document management portal

Less than 120 1 (web server with application server in one box)

From 120 to 582 1

From 583 to 1,152 2

From 1,153 to 2,094 3

From 2,095 to 2,652 4

From 2,653 to 3,144 5

Note: The number of active users can be transferred to RPS under a specific kind of user load. For example, for a heavy user load where one user generates 60 requests per hour and we have 600 active users, the calculation would be: RPS = 600 active users * 60 request / 3600 second = 10 request/second RPS is the key metric to collect when validating the SharePoint solution.

Compute resource for web server role

After finalizing the number of web servers, we used the following best practices to calculate the compute resources (vCPU and memory) for the web servers:

• Every web server should have four cores for vCPU and 12 GB of memory.

• If the web server also includes the crawler role of the search application (all-in-one topology), the best practice is to assign this server 12 cores for vCPU and 12 GB of memory.

Table 34 lists the detailed information we used to calculate the web server compute resources in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Table 34. Web server compute resource assignment

Server type Number of vCPUs Memory Number of reference virtual machines of compute resources

Web server 4

(4 reference virtual machines)

12 GB


6

Web server (including application server role)

12


12 GB


12

After completing the web server sizing, the next step is to size the application servers.

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Design Guide

The application server hosts most of the load from the service applications. Using the appropriate number of application servers ensures that the service application functions as expected.

Farm administrators can provision service applications and assign specific application servers to run them. In the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, we mainly focused on the application servers hosting the search application.

For search service applications, the application server can have six roles. General guidelines on scaling the application servers to satisfy common search usage are provided.

We used the numbers from the web server sizing to benchmark the user load. A certain percentage of the requests generated by end users are search requests. There is a relationship between the active user number and the search request load as shown in Table 35 and Table 36.

Use Table 35 and Table 36 to confirm the application server number and its roles.

The VSPEX qualification sheet for SharePoint Server 2013 has a question “Do you heavily rely on the SharePoint search function?” If the customer has a large amount of content to be searched with a high expectation of search content freshness, the answer would be “yes”. If the customer answers “no”, refer to Table 35 to size the application servers. If the customer answers “yes”, refer to Table 36 to size the application servers.

Table 35. Sizing application servers for a normal farm

Number of web servers

Number of application servers

Description

1 Web server and application role server co-exist in one box.

2 1 The application server is all-in-one.

3 2 One application server is crawler-type.

The other application server is query-type.



Table 36. Sizing application servers for a heavily used farm



Description

1 Web server and application server role co-exist in one box.



Application server sizing

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Description

3 4 Two application servers are crawler-type.

The other two application servers are query-type.





Compute resource sizing for application servers

In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, we used the following best practices to size the compute resource for the application servers.

• Application servers should have four cores for vCPU and 12 GB of memory.

• Any server running the crawler role of the search service application should have 12 cores of vCPU and 12 GB of memory.

Table 37 shows compute resource details for each type of application server.

Table 37. Application server compute resource assignment

Server type vCPU Memory Reference virtual machines of compute resources

Application

(query-type)

4


12 GB


6

Application

(crawler-type)

12


12 GB


12

Application

(all-in-one)

12


12 GB


12

SharePoint 2013 uses SQL Server as its database engine to store the content database and the databases of the service applications. Assigning the proper compute resource to the database engine is important for a well-functioning SharePoint farm.

One SharePoint farm can contain more than one SQL Server instance. Customers can choose multiple SQL Server instances to serve the SharePoint farm. In this Design Guide, we used only one SQL Server instance. We sized the compute resources for this SQL Server as follows.

Database server sizing

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Design Guide

Database server computing resource sizing

The sizing process for the SQL Server for SharePoint Server 2013 can be divided into two parts: CPU and memory.

Refer to Table 38 and Table 39 for detailed information about the vCPU and memory resources for SQL Server on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Table 38. SQL Server vCPU resource sizing for SharePoint Server 2013

Number of active users Number of web servers vCPU resource

Less than 1,000 1 or 2 4 cores

Equal or more than 1,000 Less than 5 8 cores

5 16 cores

Table 39. SQL Server memory resource sizing for SharePoint Server 2013

Number of active users Memory resource

Less than 1,000 8 GB

Equal or more than 1,000 16 GB

When the sizing of the SharePoint virtual machines and the SQL Server virtual machines is completed, the next step is to size the storage backend.

Storage layout sizing for SharePoint Server 2013

SharePoint contents that need to be stored can be classified by their usage:

• Content databases: Store site content and site settings, for example, site pages, documents, metadata, and permission settings.

• Service application databases and files: Store data and settings of specific service applications.

• Content database hosting MySites: Stores the content of the user’s MySite.

• Server’s OS volumes

These four kinds of content have different performance characteristics. According to their storage access characteristics, we divide the storage into four pools:

• Content database pool (RAID 5)

• SharePoint services pool (RAID 10)

• MySites pool (RAID 6)

• VSPEX private cloud pool that stores the OS volumes of the SharePoint servers

When sizing storage pools, perform both performance-based and capacity-based calculations on the disk layout. Compare both results and choose the larger number of the two. This ensures both requirements are satisfied.

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This section describes how to size the content database pool. EMC recommends that you first calculate from the performance perspective, and then from the capacity perspective.

Performance perspective sizing for content database pool

Figure 16 and Figure 17 show the results of EMC tests of the correlation between SharePoint user load (number of active users) and the storage performance load (host IOPS for the content database).

Figure 16. Test result of relationship of active user number and host IOPS for search intensive Publishing Portal

SharePoint Server 2013 content database pool sizing

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Design Guide

Figure 17. Test result of relationship of active user number and host IOPS for search intensive Document Management Portal

As the number of active users grows, the host IOPS on content databases grows in a linear way. Using the results here, we were able to calculate the host IOPS for any given number of active users, which we used to size the content database storage pool.

Use the following formula to calculate the host IOPS.

• For the search intensive Publishing Portal:

Host IOPS = 0.2397 * Active user number

• For the search intensive Document Management Portal:

Host IOPS = 0.4173 * Active user number

Use the following formula to calculate the back-end IOPS from the host IOPS.

• For the Publishing Portal, the read:write ratio is 3:1 with RAID 5.

Backend IOPS = Host IOPS * (3/4) + Host IOPS * (1/4) * 4 = Host IOPS * (7/4)

• For the Document Management Portal, the read:write ratio is 2:1 with RAID 5.

Backend IOPS = Host IOPS * (2/3) + Host IOPS * (1/3) * 4 = Host IOPS * 2

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Use the following formula to calculate the number of disks:

Disk number = required backend IOPS / IOPS per disk

The IOPS per disk can vary for different types of disk. Refer to the EMC recommended IOPS for different types of disk.

Finally, we used RAID 5 (4+1). The final number of disks should be rounded up by 5. Table 40 shows an example of the user input for sizing the content database pool.

Table 40. Example user input for sizing the content database pool



1


Farm 1



Initial farm size (GB)? 4,000



What is the main purpose of the SharePoint Web application? Publishing Portal



What is the quota for a single MySite (MB)? N/A

Do you heavily rely on the SharePoint search function? Yes


From this example, you can calculate as follows:

Active user number = 10000 * 50% = 5000 Host IOPS = 5000 * 0.2397 = 1198.5 Total I/O backend for RAID 5 = (1198*(3/4)) + 4* (1198*(1/4)) = 2097

Disk number = required backend IOPS / IOPS per disk = 2096.5 / 180 = 11.65

Finally, round up the disk number by 5 for RAID 5. In this case, 15 disks are needed from the IOPS perspective.

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Capacity perspective sizing for content database pool

The next step in sizing the content database pool is to consider the capacity.

Use the following formula to calculate the content database LUN size. Note that we have given 30 percent of space as a buffer:

ContentDatabase LUN size = <Content Database size> * (1 + Annual growth rate) ^ years * 1.3

Use the following formula to get the number of disks:

Spindle requirement = <Total capacity> / <Usable capacity>

When calculating the disk number, we used the disk’s usable capacity. This value can vary for different raw capacity disks.

In the example shown in Table 40, the initial farm content size is 4,000 GB. The growth rate is 20 percent and the number of years for growth is 2.

Farm capacity = 4,000 * 1.2^2 * 1.3 = 7488 GB

The usable capacity available per 600 GB 15k SAS drive is 537 GB.

SAS 600 GB requirement = 7488 / 536.81 = 13.9

When rounded up by 5, the capacity requirement is 15 disks.

This example requires 15 disks from an IOPS perspective and 15 disks from a capacity perspective. If either one is bigger than the other, choose the bigger one.

If the selected farm is not search intensive, subtract 15 percent of the host I/O from the previous calculation result to support the impact caused by frequent incremental crawls on the content databases.

To enable FAST VP, EMC recommends that you use RAID 10 (1+1) flash disk and RAID 6 (6+2) NL-SAS for the content database storage pool.

In our validated VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint 2013 solution, FAST VP saved 44 percent TCO.

This section describes how to size the services pool. As with sizing the content database pool, we calculated from both the performance perspective and the capacity perspective.

Performance perspective sizing for services pool

Table 41 and Table 42 detail the services pool sizing from a performance perspective in this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. The search intensive SharePoint farm generates sequential IOPS for the services pool. Refer to Table 41 and Table 42 to find the appropriate disk numbers, based on your customer’s business requirements.

SharePoint 2013 services pool sizing

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Table 41. Size the application server for non-intensive search farm



Description VNXe (SAS 15K) VNX (SAS 15K)

1 1 Web server and application server in one box.

RAID 10 (3+3)

6 disks

RAID 10 (1+1)

2 disks

2 1 The application server is all-in-one.

RAID 10 (3+3)

6 disks

RAID 10 (2+2)

4 disks

3 2 One application server is query-type.

The other application server is crawler-type.

RAID 10 (3+3)

6 disks

RAID 10 (4+4)

8 disks



RAID 10 (3+3)

6 disks

RAID 10 (4+4)

8 disks


The other application server is crawler-type

RAID 10 (3+3)

6 disks

RAID 10 (4+4)

8 disks

Table 42. Size the application server for intensive search farm




1 1 All service roles in one box.

RAID 10 (3+3)

6 disks

RAID 10 (3+3)

6 disks



RAID 10 (3+3)

6 disks

RAID 10 (4+4)

8 disks

3 4 Two application servers are query-type.

The other two are crawler-type.

RAID 10 (3+3)

12 disks

RAID 10 (4+4)

16 disks



RAID 10 (3+3)

12 disks

RAID 10 (4+4)

16 disks

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Design Guide






RAID 10 (3+3)

12 disks

RAID 10 (4+4)

16 disks

Capacity perspective sizing for services pool

EMC recommends that the services pool capacity requirement is 30 percent of the content capacity.

For example, if the farm content capacity requirement is 12 TB:

SAS 600 GB requirement = 12,000 * 30% / 537 = 6.7

For the VNXe array, the services pool should be RAID 10 (3+3). We need to round up the number by 6. For the VNX array, the services pool should be RAID 10 (4+4). We need to round up the number by 8. In this example, the array is VNXe, so the capacity requirement is 12 disks for the services pool.

If the table shows that the services pool should have six disks from an IOPS perspective, choose the bigger number between the IOPS disk number and the capacity disk number. In this example, the result for the services pool is 12 disks.

For the MySite pool, we used RAID 6 with the NL-SAS disk type. Since MySite has relatively low client access, when sizing MySite pool, we consider the capacity only. Refer to Table 43 for the detailed RAID configuration of the MySite pool.

Table 43. RAID configuration for the MySite pool

VNXe VNX

RAID 6 (4+2) RAID 6 (6+2)

The formula for calculating the disk number for the MySite pool is:

Disk number = Number of users * Percentage of MySite usage * Single User quota / <Disk usable capacity>

The SharePoint Server 2013 farm is composed of different servers running Windows Server OS. When you have finished the sizing of server numbers, you can then size the pool storing the OS.

The following section describes how to size the VSPEX private cloud pool for storing these operating systems.

One SharePoint Server 2013 server instance has one OS volume. The average single OS volume is 25 IOPS and the capacity is 100 GB.

Use the following formula to calculate the OS IOPS and capacity:

Total OS IOPS = Server number * 25

MySite pool sizing

VSPEX private cloud pool sizing

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Total capacity for OS = Server number * 100

For more information, refer to the following virtualization infrastructure documents:

• EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: VMware vSphere 5.1 for up to 1,000 Virtual Machines

• EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V for up to 1,000 Virtual Machines

• EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: VMware vSphere 5.1 for up to 100 Virtual Machines

• EMC VSPEX Private Cloud: Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V for up to 100 Virtual Machines

Selecting the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure

After you have completed the application sizing and obtained the numbers of reference virtual machines and suggested disk storage layouts, use the following steps to choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, based on the calculated results.

1. Use the manual sizing logic and methodology to get the total number of reference virtual machines and any additional suggested storage layouts for applications.

For example, for a SharePoint Server 2013 farm containing one web server, one application server, and one SQL server:

[SharePoint Server 2013 reference virtual machine] = Total reference virtual machines required for SharePoint Server 2013 = 6 + 4 + 12 = 22 reference virtual machines [Disks for SharePoint Server 2013 storage] = Total disk numbers suggested for SharePoint Server 2013 = 5 + 6 = 11 disks

2. If customers want to deploy other applications in the same VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, refer to the appropriate VSPEX design guide for the applications and size the total number of reference virtual machines and storage layouts for the combined workload.

For example, customers would also like to deploy Exchange 2010 and Oracle 11g on the same VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. Based on the discussion with customers, refer to the EMC VSPEX for virtualized Microsoft Exchange 2010 Design Guide to size Exchange 2010 manually and EMC VSPEX for virtualized Oracle 11g Design Guide to size Oracle 11g on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. You get the following results:

[Exchange reference virtual machines] = Total reference virtual machines required for Exchange 2010 = 12 reference virtual machines [Exchange disks] = Total disk numbers suggested for Exchange 2010 = 18 disks [Oracle reference virtual machines] = Total reference virtual machine required for [Oracle 11g] = 16 reference virtual machines

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[Oracle disks] = Total disk numbers suggested for Oracle 11g= 55 disks

3. Aggregate the total number of reference virtual machines and total disk numbers for all applications. For example:

Total reference virtual machines for applications = SharePoint reference virtual machines + Exchange reference virtual machines + Oracle reference virtual machines = 22 reference virtual machines + 12 reference virtual machines + 16 reference virtual machines = 50 reference virtual machines Total disks for applications = SharePoint disks + Exchange disks + Oracle disks = 11 disks + 18 disks + 55 disks = 84 disks

4. Discuss with your customers the maximum utilization of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for the applications and virtualization solution they want to use to meet their business requirements. Calculate the total number of disks for the reference virtual machines suggested for the combined applications.

For example, since Oracle will be also deployed on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, EMC recommends that customers use VMware as the virtualization solution, enabled by VNX. If customers want a maximum 75 percent utilization for all the combined applications, the calculation would be:

Total reference virtual machines needed for applications = Total reference virtual machines for applications / Maximum utilization = 50 reference virtual machines / 75% = 67 reference virtual machines Total disks needed for applications= Total disks for applications / Maximum utilization = 84 disks/ 75% = 112 disks

5. Use Table 44 and the total number of reference virtual machines to select the minimum recommended VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

In this example, because Oracle is also deployed on the same VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, EMC recommends that customers use VMware as the virtualization solution, enabled by VNX. In this example, EMC recommends that you select the VSPEX private cloud for VMware solution for up to 125 reference virtual machines as the minimum VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for the combined workload.

Table 44. VSPEX storage model support matrix

VSPEX Proven Infrastructure models*

Maximum supported reference virtual machines

Supported storage array

Up to 50 virtual machines 50 VNXe3150

Up to 100 virtual machines 100 VNXe3300

Up to 300 virtual machines 300 VNX5400

Up to 600 virtual machines 600 VNX5600

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VSPEX Proven Infrastructure models*

Maximum supported reference virtual machines

Supported storage array

Up to 1,000 virtual machines 1,000 VNX5800

*Includes the following VSPEX models: VSPEX private cloud for Microsoft and VSPEX private cloud for VMware

6. Refer to the appropriate EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure and calculate the number of disks required for the VSPEX private cloud pool by using the virtual infrastructure building block methodology.

In this example, EMC suggests you select a VSPEX private cloud for VMware solution for up to 125 reference virtual machines as the minimum VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. After referring to the building block of the VSPEX private cloud pool, you get the total disk number required:

Total disks for private cloud = 5 SAS disks + 2 SSD disks = 7 disks

7. Aggregate the total number of disks required including the number of disks for combined applications, the VSPEX private cloud pool, and the hot spare.

Total disks = Total disks needed for applications + Total disks for private cloud + Hot spare = 112 disks + 7 disks + 4 disks = 123 disks

8. Compare the values in Table 45 with Table 44 to make sure the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure supported array can support the total number of disks that are required for the combined applications and private cloud pool. If not, you may need to upgrade to the next model of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

In this example, EMC recommends the VSPEX private cloud for VMware solution for up to 300 reference virtual machine as the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, and VNX5400 as the storage array. VNX5400 can support a maximum of 250 disks in total, which fits the requirement of 118 disks that you may need for the combined workload. As a result, EMC recommends that you consider the VSPEX private cloud for VMware solution for up to 300 reference virtual machines for customers to deploy the proven infrastructure.

Table 45. Storage system support matrix

Storage system Maximum number of drives storage system

VNXe3150 100

VNXe3300 150

VNX5400 250

VNX5600 500

VNX5800 750

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