SharePoint 2010 with a virtual SQL 2008 database. Will it perform?

10 03 2010

Many people have many different opinions on this subject. Is it wise to virtualise SQL? I think it is fine. I was once not so sure but visiting SharePoint best practices conference last year as well as a data management event I now feel pretty confident. Also with our beast of a hyper-v setup I can have more RAM in a virtual SQL box than I could ever dream of in a physical server!

So on to SharePoint 2010.  I wrote a couple of simle SQL scripts just to make the database server do some work and then I used SharePoint to see how it was afected. (I’m a Firefox user so all the SharePoint stuff was done using that) The SQL server was SQL 2008 with 10Gb RAM, with the data going to a normal vhd (our production environment will be virtual failover cluster with data over iSCSI). SharePoint is sitting on a virtual machine with 8GB of RAM.

I did the following actions and timed how long each step took. Then I did them twice more; once with the SQL CPU running at 100% and then again with the disk being very busy writing rows to a database and also sharepoint performing a full crawl.

The tasks were:

Create a Team Site

Upload a docx (this was a sample made using the great “=rand(10,10)” feature of Word)

Open the document using Web Apps

Save the document after editing it within the browser

And finally deleting the site

I selected these actions as they are the kind of things people will be doing everyday with sharepoint. I didnt inclide page loading times as there was no noticble difference between browsing the site when SQL was under load and when it was not.

And the results are in:

  Control (No Load) [seconds] 100% CPU [seconds] Disk load /full crawl [seconds]
Create Site 2.3 39.0 15.2
Upload Docx < 1 3.3 1.5
Open with Web App 1.5 6 6.8
Save Docx 2.3 13.0 1.8
Delete Site < 1 2.3 1.2

Pretty good really. Even with the SQL server sweating away at the backend your dear SharePoint end users will be uploading and viewing documents with minimal fustration!

If anyone else has any numbers or tests they have performed (or want to question mine) then please leave a comment!

Chris


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Categories : HyperV, SQL, Sharepoint 2010

Migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010

10 03 2010

   Last week the twitter community and blogosphere came alive with the news of the release dates of SharePoint 2010 (April RTM and June general release) so I thought that I would share with you our migration strategy from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010. The foundation for all of our new builds will be a HyperV virtualized environment the server specification we have chosen for our hosts is as follows

5 x Dell PowerEdge R710 with 72 GB Ram also 2 x Intel XeonX55702.93Ghz Processors

Storage for this and our other virtual servers will be with on a Nexsan SAN solution with 2.5 TB of SAS drives for our SQL databases and 7TB of SATA drives for general storage.

 For our Guest VHD’s for SharePoint we will give each virtual server 8GB Ram each with 64bit Server 2008 R2 installed we will also split the server roles over the 3 virtual SharePoint servers. Chris McKinley will follow up this post with a more detailed look at running SQL 2008 in a failover cluster in HyperV.

 We have already tried moving our 2007 content database over to SharePoint 2010 in our development setup with very good results but I will talk more about that after Chris has posted details of the virtualized SQL setup.


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Categories : Sharepoint 2010

HyperV Cluster Setup Part 5

7 03 2010

This is the fifth and final part of the HyperV cluster setup series of video tutorials with the help of Alan Richards in this video Alan gives a demo of live migration in a HyperV setup no sound in this video but a picture (Or video) paints a thousand words. I hope you have enjoyed and can reuse the info in these videos later this week I will start a blog post on our SharePoint 2010 architecture based solely in HyperV including our SQL 2008 virtual failover cluster.


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Categories : HyperV, Server 2008 R2

Finding Stale Accounts in Active Directory

7 03 2010

 I have been having a Twitter conversation with Martin Byford-Rew the IT Manager at Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough and others about finding stale accounts in active directory, now I do not have that concern as I use an AD tools which runs overnight and creates or archives accounts as pupils, staff and parents arrive at or leave Twynham, but more of that in a later post.

 Before we used the current AD tools I also had the same problem with keeping Active Directory tidy and up to date the only way I found before reaching for scripting tools was to use the query tools available in Active Directory so I hope this post helps Martin.

  1. Open Active Directory users and computers at the top you will see “saved queries”
  2. Right click Saved Queries and choose new query
  3. Put a name in the name field I chose “Not Logged On For 30 Days”
  4. You can choose to query the whole of your directory or just one OU
  5. Click Define Query
  6. If you are only interested in finding accounts that have not logged on for a while you get the choice between 30,60,90,120 or 180 days since last logon

We only use these queries now to check out parental accounts for inactivity but a tool that is built in but rarely used. Below you can see the results of the query that we created.


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HyperV Cluster Setup Part 4

7 03 2010

This is the fourth part of the HyperV cluster setup with the help of Alan Richards in this video Alan shows how to install the HyperV role and also how he set up the network for the HyperCluster and finally we see how to make a virtual server highly available through HyperV.

Dave


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Categories : HyperV, Server 2008 R2

SharePoint 2010 Web Apps, Where’s the Save Button

6 03 2010

 I have been using SharePoint 2010 for quite a while now but it was only yesterday that I tried the Excel, PowerPoint and Onenote web apps having limited myself to using the Word web apps all throughout our testing phase of our SharePoint 2010 deployment.

 So it was only when I was using these apps that I noticed that there is no save button but they save dynamically as you use them. So for anyone else that cannot find the save button please see the images below.


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Categories : Sharepoint 2010, WebApps

Hyper V Cluster Setup Part 3

6 03 2010

This is the third part of the HyperV cluster setup with the help of Alan Richards in this video Alan shows how to create the Cluster shared volume, This clustered shared volume in server 2008 R2 was the main reason that I wanted to use HyperV as with this we can live migrate virtual machines and we obviously have fault tolerance on our cluster.

Dave


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Categories : HyperV, Server 2008 R2

Office 2010 Getting Closer

5 03 2010

 On the Microsoft Office website you can now find details of the free upgrades from Office 2007 to Office 2010. The Technology Guarantee programme gives you a free upgrade for customers that purchase and activate a qualifying Office 2007 between March 5th 2010 and September 30th  2010 there are of course conditions but questions are answered on the website. I have heard no definitive dates yet for the eagerly awaited RTM of SharePoint 2010 but rumour has it that it will be publicly available in June 2010. See Update Below

Today, we officially announced that May 12th, 2010, is the launch date for SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010. In addition, we announced our intent to RTM (Release to Manufacturing) this April 2010.  

It’s an exciting time for us! We hope you can virtually join us on May 12th at 11am EST to listen to Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division, announce the launch. You can register for the event @ http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx.


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Hyper V Cluster Setup Part 2

5 03 2010

This is the second part of the HyperV cluster setup with the help of Alan Richards in this video Alan shows how to create the Failover Cluster, he goes through the validation of the cluster and creating the cluster itself also setting up node and disk majority. Alan later posted some corrections which I have included below the video.

Dell MD300i SAN

After some more research I changed the configuration of our SAN and iSCSI network. The SAN has 2 controllers each with 2 iSCSI ports; I setup the IP addresses as shown below

  • Module 0, Port 0 – 192.168.1.10/24
  • Module 0, Port 1 – 192.168.1.11/24
  • Module 1, Port 0 – 192.168.2.10/24
  • Module 1, Port 1 – 192.168.2.11/24

I then setup each server to have 2 network cards associated with the iSCSI network, 1 on each of the subnets from the SAN settings. Then I setup 2 switches, 1 for each subnet and connected them up appropriately

MPIO

On investigation into the errors about MPIO I found that Dell recommend using their configuration utility to setup the iSCSI initiator on Windows. So armed with DVD, I deleted all references to the SAN in the iSCSI setup and ran the Dell config utility and sure enough it added all the necessary settings into the iSCSI initiator

Network

The warnings on the network mainly consisted of multiple network cards on the same subnet. Part of this was resolved by have the iSCSI cards on different subnets but the rest were obviously on the same subnet because they were setup for Hyper-V. I did some more research and found that in Hyper-V manager you can set it so that Hyper-V and the actual server don’t share the network card.

Dave


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Categories : HyperV

Mind Manager for SharePoint 2010

4 03 2010

 At Twynham we use mindJets Mind Manager for students and staff but today I started seeing in Twitter tweets for Mind manager for SharePoint so I checked out the site and found the specs and not one mention of SharePoint 2010 which is very understandable, but I thought I would download the trial and check to see if it does work on our SharePoint 2010 demo site, and I am very pleased to be able to report that it works fine as you can see from the image below it maps SharePoint 2010 sites and returns all the assets it finds. I also tried adding a document through mind manger and all good it uploaded the file and refreshed the map.

 Now as I stated at the beginning of this post I do not use Mind Manager but I may just start using the SharePoint version now…

Dave


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