Infrastructure Best Practices for SharePoint On-Premises

Michael Noel - CCO

Michael Noel• Author of SAMS Publishing titles “SharePoint 2013 Unleashed,” “SharePoint 2010

Unleashed”, “Windows Server 2012 Unleashed,” “Exchange Server 2013 Unleashed”, “ISA Server 2006 Unleashed”, and a total of 19 titles that have sold over 300,000 copies.

• Partner at Convergent Computing (www.cco.com) – San Francisco, U.S.A. based Infrastructure/Security specialists for SharePoint, AD, Exchange, System Center, Security, etc.

What’s new in Infrastructure for SharePoint 2013

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 or Windows Server 2012 (Preferred)

• SQL Server 2008 R2 w/SP1 or SQL Server 2012 (Preferred)

Type Memory Processor

Dev/Stage/Test server 8GB RAM 4 CPU

‘All-in-one’ DB/Web/SA 24GB RAM 4 CPU

Web/SA Server 12GB RAM 4 CPU

DB Server (medium environments) 16GB RAM 8 CPU

DB Server (small environments) 8GB RAM 4 CPU

What’s new in Infrastructure for SharePoint 2013

Software/Hardware Requirements

• Office Web Apps is no longer a service application• Web Analytics is no longer service application, it’s part of

search• New service applications available and improvements on

existing ones– App Management Service – Used to manage the new SharePoint app

store from the Office Marketplace or the Application Catalog– SharePoint Translation Services – provides for language translation of

Word, XLIFF, and PPT files to HTML– Work Management Service – manages tasks across SharePoint, MS

Exchange and Project.– Access Services App (2013) – Replaces 2010 version of Access Services

What’s new in Infrastructure for SharePoint 2013

Changes in Service Applications and New Service Applications

• A new Windows service – the Distributed Cache Service – is installed on each server in the farm when SharePoint is installed

• It is managed via the Services on Server page in central admin as the Distributed Cache service

• The config DB keeps track of which machines in the farm are running the cache service

What’s new in Infrastructure for SharePoint 2013

Distributed Cache Service

• The purpose of the Request Management feature is to give SharePoint knowledge of and more control over incoming requests

• Having knowledge over the nature of incoming requests – for example, the user agent, requested URL, or source IP – allows SharePoint to customize the response to each request

• RM is applied per web app, just like throttling is done in SharePoint 2010

What’s new in Infrastructure for SharePoint 2013

Request Management (RM)

• Option 1 (AD Import): Simple one-way Sync (a la SharePoint 2007)

• Option 2: Two-way, possible write-back to AD options using small FIM service on UPA server (a la 2010)

• Option 3: Full Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) Synchronization, allows for complex scenarios – Larger clients will appreciate this

What’s new in Infrastructure for SharePoint 2013

User Profile Sync – Three Options for Deployment

• SharePoint 2013 continues to offer support for both claims and classic authentication modes

• However claims authentication is THE default authentication option now– Classic authentication mode is still there, but can only be

managed in PowerShell – it’s gone from the UI – Support for classic mode is deprecated and will go away in a

future release– There also a new process to migrate accounts from

Windows classic to Windows claims – the Convert-SPWebApplication cmdlet

What’s new in Infrastructure for SharePoint 2013

Claims-based Authentication - Default

• Stores new versions of documents as ‘shredded BLOBs that are deltas of the changes

• Promises to reduce storage size significantly

What’s new in Infrastructure for SharePoint 2013

Shredded Storage

• New Search architecture (FAST based) with one unified search

• Personalized search results based on search history

• Rich contextual previews

What’s new in Infrastructure for SharePoint 2013

Search – FAST Search now included

ARCHITECTING THE FARM

Web

Service Apps

Data

Architecting the Farm

Three Layers of SharePoint Infrastructure

• ‘All-in-One’ (Avoid)

DB and SP Roles Separate

Architecting the Farm

Small Farm Models

• 2 SharePoint Servers running Web and Service Apps

• 2 Database Servers (AlwaysOn FCI or AlwaysOn Availability Groups)

• 1 or 2 Index Partitions with equivalent query components

• Smallest farm size that is fully highly available

Architecting the Farm

Smallest Highly Available Farm

• 2 Dedicated Web Servers (NLB)

• 2 Service Application Servers

• 2 Database Servers (Clustered or Mirrored)

• 1 or 2 Index Partitions with equivalent query components

Architecting the Farm

Best Practice ‘Six Server Farm’

• Separate farm for Service Applications

• One or more farms dedicated to content

• Service Apps are consumed cross-farm

• Isolates ‘cranky’ service apps like User Profile Sync and allows for patching in isolation

Architecting the Farm

Ideal – Separate Service App Farm + Content Farm(s)

• Multiple Dedicated Web Servers

• Multiple Dedicated Service App Servers

• Multiple Dedicated Query Servers

• Multiple Dedicated Crawl Servers, with multiple Crawl DBs to increase parallelization of the crawl process

• Multiple distributed Index partitions (max of 10 million items per index partition)

• Two query components for each Index partition, spread among servers

Architecting the Farm

Large SharePoint Farms

SharePoint Virtualization

Allows organizations that wouldn’t normally be able to have a test environment to run one

Allows for separation of the database role onto a dedicated server Can be more easily scaled out in the future

Sample 1: Single Server Environment

SP Server Virtualization

High-Availability across Hosts

All components Virtualized

Sample 2: Two Server Highly Available Farm

SP Server Virtualization

Highest transaction servers are physical

Multiple farm support, with DBs for all farms on the SQL AOAG

Sample 3: Mix of Physical and Virtual Servers

SP Server Virtualization

Scaling to Large Virtual Environments

SP Server Virtualization

• Processor (Host Only)– <60% Utilization = Good– 60%-90% = Caution– >90% = Trouble

• Available Memory – 50% and above = Good– 10%-50% = OK– <10% = Trouble

• Disk – Avg. Disk sec/Read or Avg. Disk sec/Write– Up to 15ms = fine– 15ms-25ms = Caution– >25ms = Trouble

• Network Bandwidth – Bytes Total/sec– <40% Utilization = Good– 41%-64% = Caution– >65% = Trouble

• Network Latency - Output Queue Length– 0 = Good– 1-2= OK– >2 = Trouble

Virtualization of SharePoint ServersVirtualization Performance Monitoring

Data Management

Sample Distributed Content Database Design

Data Management

• Can reduce dramatically the size of Content DBs, as upwards of 80%-90% of space in content DBs is composed of BLOBs

• Can move BLOB storage to more efficient/cheaper storage• Improve performance and scalability of your SharePoint

deployment – But highly recommended to use third party

Remote BLOB Storage (RBS)

Data Management

SQL Database Optimization

DB-AFile 1

DB-BFile 1

Volume #1

DB-AFile 2

DB-BFile 2

Volume #2

DB-AFile 3

DB-BFile 3

Volume #3

DB-AFile 4

DB-BFile 4

Volume #4

Tempdb File 1 Tempdb File 2 Tempdb File 3 Tempdb File 4

Multiple Files for SharePoint Databases

SQL Server Optimization

• Break Content Databases and TempDB into multiple files (MDF, NDF), total should equal number of physical processors (not cores) on SQL server.

• Pre-size Content DBs and TempDB to avoid fragmentation• Separate files onto different drive spindles for best IO perf.• Example: 50GB total Content DB on Two-way SQL Server would have two

database files distributed across two sets of drive spindles = 25GB pre-sized for each file.

Multiple Files for SharePoint Databases

SQL Server Optimization

• Implement SQL Maintenance Plans!• Include DBCC (Check Consistency) and either Reorganize

Indexes or Rebuild Indexes, but not both!

SQL Database OptimizationSQL Maintenance Plans

• Add backups into the maintenance plan if they don’t exist already

• Be sure to truncate transaction logs with a T-SQL Script (after full backups have run…)

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

High Availability and Disaster RecoverySQL Server Solution

Potential Data Loss (RPO)

Potential Recovery Time

(RTO)

Automatic Failover

Additional Readable Copies

AlwaysOn Availability Groups – Synchronous (Dual-phase commit, no data loss, can’t operate across WAN)

None 5-7 Seconds Yes 0 - 2

AlwaysOn Availability Groups – Asynchronous (Latency tolerant, cross WAN option, potential for data loss)

Seconds Minutes No 0 - 4

AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instance (FCI) – Traditional shared storage clustering

NA 30 Seconds to several minutes (depending on disk failover)

Yes N/A

Database Mirroring - High-safety (Synchronous) Zero 5-10 seconds Yes N/A

Database Mirroring - High-performance (Asynchronous) Seconds Manually initiated, can be a

few minutes if automated

No N/A

SQL Log Shipping Minutes Manually initated, can be a

few minutes if automated, by typically hours

No Not duringa restore

Traditional Backup and Restore Hours to Days Typically multiple hours, days, or

weeks

No Not duringa restore

Comparison of High Availability and Disaster Recovery Options

HA and DR

AlwaysOn Availability Groups in SQL 2012HA and DR

DemoCreating SQL 2012 AOAGs

• Hardware Based Load Balancing (F5, Cisco, Citrix NetScaler – Best performance and scalability

• Software Windows Network Load Balancing fully supported by MS, but requires Layer 2 VLAN (all packets must reach all hosts.) Layer 3 Switches must be configured to allow Layer 2 to the specific VLAN.

• If using Unicast, use two NICs on the server, one for communications between nodes.

• If using Multicast, be sure to configure routers appropriately

• Set Affinity to Single (Sticky Sessions)• If using VMware, note fix to NLB RARP issue

(http://tinyurl.com/vmwarenlbfix)

Network Load Balancing

HA and DR

Security and Documentation

• Infrastructure Security and Best practices– Physical Security– Best Practice Service Account Setup– Kerberos Authentication

• Data Security– Role Based Access Control (RBAC)– Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) of SQL Databases

• Transport Security– Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) from Server to Client– IPSec from Server to Server

• Edge Security– Inbound Internet Security (Forefront UAG/TMG)

• Rights Management

Five Layers of SharePoint Security

Security

• Document all key settings in IIS, SharePoint, after installation

• Consider monitoring for changes after installation for Config Mgmt.

• Fantastic tool for this is the SPDocKit - can be found at http://tinyurl.com/spdockit

SPDocKit

Document SharePoint

Thanks for attending!Questions?

Michael NoelTwitter: @MichaelTNoel

www.cco.comSlides: slideshare.net/michaeltnoelTravel blog: sharingtheglobe.com

SharePoint 2013 Unleashed:tinyurl.com/sp2013unleashed