Today was first day of 5 days SharePoint 2013 training for me. As you may expect first day of this training dealt with what SharePoint is (including use cases, planning and architecture) and we also went through 3 tier SharePoint 2013 SP1 farm installation.
I’m posting crude notes from day 1 with intent to trim them later 🙂
\n\nSites: Internet/Intranet/B2B. Portals = Data + Services’SQL DB actual storage of documentClient: IE/other browser.\n\n
\n\nCollaboration. Versioning. Approvals. Notifications.\n\nContent storage: Files (any)/ Data in Tables (Calendar events, Tasks, Any Web Tables, Polls, Surveys)\n\nPortals VS Sites\n\nPortal – data + services (e.g. Yandex – search engine, mail, marker, maps, traffic data)\n\nSP Services:\nSearch (content indexing, including data external to SP like files on file servers) – has to be configured first\nUser Profiles Service – stores data about users. Sub components: Profiles (photo, details etc.), My Sites (site for each user where he has full access); potentially may be substituted with Yammer\nInfoPath Services – for creation of InfoPath forms on SP for data collection etc. (InfoPath is still alive and kicking 🙂 )\nExcel Services – BA services, tooks Excel documents stored on SP and use them as a data source on SP pages\nMMS – Managed Metadata Services – for building taxonomies across site collections\ns\nBCS – Business Connectivity Services (DBs as data sources)\n\nEDMS. SP is not a DMS OOB. SP includes workflows (SP designer allow codeless creation of workflows)\n\nSP 2013 introduced forms for collaboration (community sites, forums)\n\nSP could be development platform\n\nTypical SP usecases: 1) Corporate DropBox 2) Requests system (SP sites + InfoPath or other forms) 3) EDMS 4) External/Public portal/site (expensive, requires heavy customization)\n\nSP imlementation development options: 1) No coding, only GUI tools – allows for easy migrations/upgrades to new SP versions. Painless. Supported. 2) Custom development – migration is a pain, potential loss of what you built. Your deployment evolves into “sepatate branch”\n\nSP team (ideal scenario 🙂 ): 1. SA (back end, architecture planning) 2. DBA (SP stores all its data in SQL) 3. Developer (ASP.NET/VS/DOT.NET) – optional if codebased SP development required. 4. Developer/Designer (SP Designer/Infopath Designer/Report Builder) 5. Designer (design site templates) 6. Site Administrator (end-user SP features exert which has company BP)\n\nSP Farm – group of SP servers with shared configuration DB (SharePoint_Config) which serves your sites and runs SP services\n\nSharePoint_Config DB stores SP farm config.\n\nSP farm can comprise out of 1 to N servers\n\nSP 2013 Foundation – no services (only search and BCS), can be downloaded free from MS site\nSP 2013 Standard (no BA services – Excel, Performance Point)\nSP 2013 Enterprise\n\nStd/Ent – the same distributive, feature set defined by key\n\nWithin 1 farm different editions of SP can be used\n\nEditions comparison:\n\n
SP servers:
WFE (Web Front End) – IIS – receives/returns clients queries
DB server (content databases, SharePoint_Config) – stores data
App Server – runs SP services – processes client queries
Production minimum: 2 servers WFE + APP & DB
Defining number of servers for SP farm. Factor in:
1) Number of employees
2) RPS (Requests per second) – difficult to quantify exactly in advance, some formulas available
3) Percentage of simultaneously working users
4) Quotien of peak load (typically value of 2 is used)
5) Average number of requests from user per day
RPS:
Evaluation of content DBs size
CDB size = ((DxV)xS) + (10Kbx(L+(VxD)))
Microsoft suggested farm topologies:
1 Server – WFE+APP+SQL on one box, less that 100 users or evaluation
2 tier farm – WFE+APP & SQL up to 10 000 users
3 tier farm – WFE & APP & DB
next different varieties of scaling out
Virtualization consodirations:
– spread extra servers on different hypervisor hosts
– don’t use snapshots in production (performance hit, potential data loss due to corruption of one VHD in the chain of snaphots)
– avoid dynamic memory, SP tends to hog it all/max limit
– multiple CPU settins, N of vCPUs should not be more than twice of N of real cores on virtualization hosts
– no thin provisioning, only fixed disks
SQL clustering (mirroring/AlwaysOn)
Office Web App (OWA) – separate product
IOPS min 0.25 per GB of DB, recommended 2 IOPS per GB
Soft limit 200GB / hard limit 4 TB for content DBs. Soft limit in place because of serviceabilty – back up/restore, maintenance time will be too long for big DBs
For SP farm diagrams package for Visio is available:
sharepoint visio stensils 2013s
Accounts for SP
SQL Server support: Server 2008 SP1 and beyond
.NET 3.5 installation from local source for SQL:
dism /online /enable-feature /all /featurename:netfx3 /source:d:sourcessxs /limitaccess
Minimum SQL components:
Database Engine and data files, Replication, Full-Text Search, and Data Quality Services\nClient Components (other than SQL Server Books Online components and Integration Services tools)\nSQL Management Studio
Use named instances for convenience
Collation:
Named instance uses random TCP port (see SQL Server Configuration Manager)
Alias os strongly recommended for flexibility (SQL sever change)
c:windowssystem32cliconfg on SP server – create alias
3 rules:
Random instance port
Program instance exe
UDP 1434 SQL Server Browser
MAXDOP=1 is required for SP farm install (when you do an install with full rights installer sets it to 1, if no rights – install fails)
SP install:
1. Prerequisites install (IIS + Components)
2. SP installation (extraction)
3. Language packs/updates installation
4. Farm creation wizard
SP prerequisites script (useful when SP server has no access to Internet)
No WCF 5.6 which is required for SP2013 SP1 and App Fabric CU
SP distrib contain folder prerequisiteinstallerfiles
Never choise stand-alone for prod install, as it will install local SQL and you won’t be able to add more servers into farm
SP product configuration wizard
SP DB access account – sp_farm (farm account, used for Windows Timer Service, CA and User Profile service)
passphrase – used when adding servers to domain and also for encryption SP service passwords, could be changed by farm administrator in CA
IE loopback check issue – when you unable to access sites from SP server, solution regedit:
\n\n[code language=”powershell” light=”true”]\nNew-ItemProperty HKLM:SystemCurrentControlSetControlLsa -Name "DisableLoopbackCheck" -Value "1" -PropertyType dword\n[/code]\n