SharePoint 2010 Topologies Part 3

13 04 2010

 In my previous post of this series I looked at the standard topologies for SharePoint 2010 through this post I will look at how we at Twynham are going to configure SharePoint 2010 for our environment. We will be deploying SharePoint 2010 and SQL 2008 in a HyperV cluster the configuration for our virtual servers will be SharePoint web front end servers each with 8 GB Ram and SQL with 9 GB the SQL server will also be configured in a failover cluster with one LUN of our SAN dedicated to SQL 2008. The image below illustrates how we are deploying our solution

The virtual application server will also be deployed with 8GB Ram. The last server in our configuration will be our streaming media server which will remain physical as we wish to reuse one of our Dell MD3000 boxes but when this goes end of life in a year time this will also be virtualized by adding more SATA storage to our SAN.

 There is still debate about Virtual Vs Physical but as we build our solution and go live i will post about how it performs.


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Categories : HyperV, Sharepoint 2010

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, Sharepoint 2010, SQL

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

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

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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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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Hyper V Cluster Setup Part 1

4 03 2010

A while ago I started writing some posts on our HyperV setup with the intention of writing more on how we setup our HyperV cluster; well I was beaten to that by a friend and fellow network manager in education Alan Richards from Westhatch School. Now myself and Alan have a friendly rivalry when it comes to deployments Alan beat me with his Windows 7 rollout and I beat him with my HyperV cluster and I will beat Alan with our SharePoint 2010 rollout.

 But I found out yesterday that Alan has done a series of video post on setting up his HyperV so I asked him this morning if it was ok for me to do some posts on the setup and include his videos which he agreed to. The setups that Alan describes through the videos are identical to my own, so please enjoy the videos as he post more I will include them on the site. In the coming weeks myself and Chris will be doing a series of post on how we intend to deploy SharePoint 2010 and SQL 2008 in a virtual environment including our architecture drawings and data on SQL performance in HyperV.  


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Saving Money with Virtualisation Using HyperV R2

11 01 2010

As i said in a previous post in our preparation for SharePoint 2010 we have started to invest in virtualisation technology using Microsoft HyperV R2 based on Server 2008 R2. This for me has been a big shift in thinking in taking this technology on and trusting it to run our servers but thanks to some of the tools available this has been made a lot easier for me, and with the release of HyperV R2 even easier with some of the benefits being live migration, Processor compatibility mode and dynamic storage being just some of the reasons. Over the next few posts i would like to take you through some of the features that made this decision a no brainer for us and hopefully explain some of the benefits for others.

  Through these posts i will talk to you about HyperV R2 on Server 2008 R2 the hardware that we have purchased to enable us to use this. HyperV manager, System centre virtual machine manager including the live migration feature and also the physical to virtual conversion which i hope to show you in a video.

First of all the hardware to achieve the fault tolerance that i require for Twynham School we purchased 3 x Dell PowerEdge servers with:-

2x Intel Xeon X5570 Processor (2.93GHz, 8M Cache, 6.40 GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT)

To include RAM: 72GB Memory for 2CPU (18x4GB Dual Rank RDIMMs) 1066MHz

Hard Drives: 2 x 300GB SAS 15k 3.5″ HD Hot Plug

 Also to allow us to setup the shared clustered volume we purchased a Dell MD3000i http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/pvaul/topics/en/us/pvaul_md3000i_landing?c=us&l=en

Now this was not a cheap exercise with the servers coming in at £5000 each and the MD3000i box at around £6000 but now we run 19 virtual servers on these 3 boxes and bearing in mind that i used to pay anywhere between £2000 and £3500 for each server i think you will see that it makes sense long term financially. Also please bear in mind the power savings, we do have a range of server with differing specs and age but now we are running 3 servers compared to 19 previously that must equate to quite a saving on our power bill and not forgetting our  air conditioners as we can go from 2 to 1 unit.

  These virtual servers also enabled us to set up Office Communication Server 2007 R2 during the summer this software required us to have 1 OCS front end server and also an OCS edge server previously we would have had to go out and buy 2 physical servers but with HyperV we just created 2 virtual OCS servers.


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Categories : HyperV, Server 2008 R2, SharePoint

Preparing for SharePoint 2010

2 01 2010

Back in June I and Mike Herrity visited Seattle where we had the opportunity to meet up with the SharePoint product team and also the Education team at Microsoft Redmond.  After a presentation to the SharePoint Product group we were fortunate to spend some time with Brenda Carter to discuss our thoughts for SharePoint 2010 in terms of our planned SharePoint Farm.  We intend to be early adopters of this platform so in readiness we have started to plan our architecture for this version. 

We have already started the planning and purchasing so we were very much ready for the public Beta which became available in November 2009. Along with a testing farm we have already planned a school demo site for people to try and see the power of SharePoint 2010 http://ict.twynhamschool.com/SitePages/Home.aspx. For this setup of our SharePoint farm we will be using Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V R2 to deploy our web front end servers and with this in mind we have purchased three Dell Poweredge R710 servers with the following spec. In a future blog post I will run through the rationale of making such a significant purchase.

Server: 2x Intel Xeon X5570 Processor (2.93GHz, 8M Cache, 6.40 GT/s QPI, Turbo, HT)

To include RAM: 72GB Memory for 2CPU (18x4GB Dual Rank RDIMMs) 1066MHz

Hard Drives: 2 x 300GB SAS 15k 3.5″ HD Hot Plug

 

Within the Farm we will have 2 SharePoint front end servers and also an SharePoint Application server the big debate is whether or not to virtualize the indexing server with the processor overheads associated with the indexing service how will that work on our virtual servers  We have also purchased a Dell MD3000i with 2TB of storage which we can expand up to 10 TB for storage of our images and video files in readiness for the production setup of our farm  This server specification may seem over powered but these servers are not just for SharePoint as we plan to virtualise a lot of our server stock we have over the coming year so you will also see a post on Hyper-V R2.

 The biggest debate is whether to virtualize the indexing server or not, well the beta programme will give us the chance to try lots of different scenarios including a virtualized indexing server which I will tell you about in future posts. One other scenario we will try is a virtualized install of SQL 2008 to host our SharePoint databases this is something that Chris McKinley is not keen on but I do think that while we are going through the testing phase it would be worth considering and trying all installations types so hopefully we can report back on the best and worst.


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Categories : HyperV, Server 2008 R2, SharePoint


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