SharePoint 2010 Performance and Capacity Case Studies

•SharePoint 2010 Service Architecture
•SharePoint 2010 Logical Architecture
•SharePoint 2010 Architecture and Design Models
•SharePoint 2010 Performance and Capacity Case Studies
•SharePoint 2010 Capacity Planning
•SharePoint 2010 Cache Strategies
•SharePoint 2010 Databases
•SharePoint 2010 Physical Topology

Now that you are getting going on understanding some of the architectures of SharePoint 2010 I just stumbled across these case studies that have been published by Microsoft. They are simple but great re-enforcement of what you have been reading in my series.


Performance and capacity technical case studies (SharePoint Server 2010)

There are case studies on:

• Publishing
• Intranet
• Department Collaboration
• Social

For each they go over:

• Required hardware
• Topology
• Configuration
• Workload
• Data
• Performance Monitoring

Along this same lines I would also read two whitepapers from here. Specifically read the following:

• Capacity Planning and Sizing for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Based Divisional Portal (Divisional PortalCapacityPlanningDoc.docx )
• SharePoint Server 2010 Capacity Management for Web Content Management Deployments (WCMCapacityPlanningDoc.docx)

SharePoint 2010 Architecture and Design Models

•SharePoint 2010 Service Architecture
•SharePoint 2010 Logical Architecture
•SharePoint 2010 Architecture and Design Models
•SharePoint 2010 Performance and Capacity Case Studies
•SharePoint 2010 Capacity Planning
•SharePoint 2010 Cache Strategies
•SharePoint 2010 Databases
•SharePoint 2010 Physical Topology

I am doing some research on SharePoint 2010 Capacity Planning and I stumbled across the new and updated Technical Diagrams for SharePoint 2010. If you can get a fundamental understanding of these diagrams, you will have all the knowledge you need to correctly architect a SharePoint 2010 farm. The information in here will help you gather better requirements, create better design, create good logical and physical topologies, and help you create governance.

Here are all the documents - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263199.aspx

SharePoint 2010 Products Deployment (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=183025)
This is a good diagram that gives a high-level picture of all the environments you need to be considering (development, test, production, etc.). It provides example topologies for each and workflow for installation and configuration for each.

Services in SharePoint 2010 Products (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167092)
I used the beta version of this diagram when initially creating this series. This diagram breaks out the service architecture of SharePoint 2010. Understanding this is extremely important for building your logical topology.

Cross-farm Services in SharePoint 2010 Products (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167095)
When getting to understand SharePoint 2010 this is another very important diagram to understand. It shows the new cross farm service architecture for SharePoint 2010. All enterprise deployments of SharePoint 2010 should be considering how to utilize cross farm services.

Topologies for SharePoint Server 2010 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167089)
This diagram will give you information on how to create your physical topology. Your logical architecture, capacity planning and service availability requirements and design will drive this.

SharePoint 2010 Products: Virtualization Process (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=195022)
Great model that discusses the best practices for virtualization for all the different types of SharePoint environments you will create.

Extranet Topologies for SharePoint 2010 Products (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=187988)
I reviewed this diagram and it basically the same stuff I used for all my clients when building them an extranet environment. This has been updated for SharePoint 2010.

Hosting Environments in SharePoint 2010 Products (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167086)
I used this diagram in some of my earlier postings. This diagram is a great bridge between both the logical and physical topologies that you need. It also introduces service partitioning and has a continued discussion on cross farm services.

Databases That Support SharePoint 2010 Products (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=187969)
This is a really good model that goes over all of the databases used for SharePoint 2010.

Business Connectivity Services Model (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=165566)
This a pretty deep model that shows much of the design decisions needed to use BCS to expose enterprise data within SharePoint 2010. It discusses the BCS architecture, its security model, and how to design your data model.

Business Intelligence in SharePoint 2010 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=167170)
High level diagram that discusses some options and basic architecture of how you would incorporate BI features into SharePoint 2010.

Content Deployment in SharePoint Server 2010 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=179523&clcid=0x409)
In SharePoint 2007 the out of the box features did not work so well but it has matured a lot for SharePoint 2010. This model discusses how content deployment works, the available workflows and how data will be moved across environments.

Search Models

These models are still showing in beta mode.

• Search Technologies for SharePoint 2010 Products (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167733) -This is a great diagram that compares and contrasts the various search options you have for SharePoint and provides you some decision criteria that will help you pick the right one.
• Search Environment Planning for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167736) - This is a planning diagram that will help you with gathering requirements and making design decisions for your enterprise search solution within SharePoint 2010.
• Search Architectures for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167739) - Architecture document that goes into the details for creating both physical and logical architectures for SharePoint search.
• Design Search Architectures for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=167742) - Provides a design walkthrough for building your search solution.

SharePoint 2010 Logical Architecture

•SharePoint 2010 Service Architecture
•SharePoint 2010 Logical Architecture
•SharePoint 2010 Architecture and Design Models
•SharePoint 2010 Performance and Capacity Case Studies
•SharePoint 2010 Capacity Planning
•SharePoint 2010 Cache Strategies
•SharePoint 2010 Databases
•SharePoint 2010 Physical Topology

Introduction

In the previous blog in this series I introduced the new service architecture of SharePoint 2010. There are several changes and understanding these changes will drive both the logical and physical topologies of SharePoint 2010. When I refer to the logical topology, this means the logical organization of SharePoint services that will be used to satisfy the business needs. The physical topology is the installation and configuration of those services. The goal of both topologies it to provide a solution that is:

1. Scalable
2. Secure
3. Maintainable
4. Has high performance
5. Fault tolerant

In this blog I will take these themes and apply them to various way in which SharePoint 2010 can be configured to support the logical topology. I will go into the physical topology in the next part.

SharePoint 2010 Changes

The biggest change in SharePoint 2010 is the flexibility you now have with the configuration and re-use of services. In the previous blog in this series  I identified several rules that you should know which will directly apply to how the logical architecture of SharePoint 2010 would be done. Here they are again:

1. Multiple instances of the same Service Applications can be initiated within a farm.
2. Service Applications are shared across Web Applications within a farm by Service Group.
3. Some Service Applications can be shared across multiple farms while others cannot.
4. Service Groups can logically contain Service Applications that reside in other farms.
5. Web Applications have the flexibility to use multiple instances of the same type of Service Application (regardless of which farm hosts that service).
6. Service Applications can have its data partitioned and only accessible to specific subscribers.
7. Service Groups can be used to logically scale for performance, security and scalability.

In the following sections I have indentified some common scenarios for configuration of SharePoint 2010 logical topology based on these rules. It will not be possible in this blog to go over every permutation these rules.

As well best practices for the configuration of these services is still not very well known other than the information is being provided to us by Microsoft and our experiences with SharePoint 2007. However you should be able to take these examples and use them as a way to start doing some early planning for implementation SharePoint 2010.

Side Note – If you are familiar with some of the logical topology diagrams that are provided by Microsoft they usually include Application Pools in those diagrams. I have decided to exclude that from these diagrams to make understanding the logical topology simple. Albeit understanding how the Applications Pools are incorporated into the topology is extremely important (security and fault tolerance). Usually when architecting a SharePoint topology I start with understanding how I want to organize service to achieve the best possible performance, security and redundancy. Once I have that organized, I will then use Application Pools to help attain those tenants.

Single Farm Single Service Group

This first topology depicts a standard SharePoint farm that has a single service group that is shared across all types of sites. Any time new sites are added within this farm, they will have access to all of the services that are available in the Default Application Group.

Advantages:

• Most simple architecture to implement.
• All web applications added into the farm have immediate access to all the available services.
• All services are grouped together and can be managed centrally.

Disadvantages:

• Does not allow for isolation of data used within the services. This means that all websites have access to each other’s data.
• Cannot create dedicate services for specific web applications.
• Will not scale well because publishing and collaboration would be occurring in the same farm.

Recommendations:

• This is an initial place to start as your configuration for SharePoint 2010. It can always be scaled or reconfigured to support more demand.
• It would be recommended to make sure that each service that can be partitioned be made partitioned. Service partition is introduced in the previous blog in this series. This is important because it not possible to partition a service after has been created. If services are partitioned from the beginning you have the ability to create some isolation of data between site collections.
• These sites could all be installed on a single web application but that is not recommended. It is better to created dedication Web Applications for each running within their own application pool. This provides long-term scalability.



Single Farm Multiple Service Groups

This second example is a reconfiguration of the previous farm; the difference is that multiple Application groups have been created. There is a Default Application Group which has some of the core Service Applications that can be used by all the sites. Some sites, however, will have dedicated services. You will want to have dedicated services for scalability, performance and security reasons and this will be covered later on from a physical perspective.

Observations:

• First thing that is interesting about this configuration is you see the Managed Metadata Service is configured into each application group. One interesting thing we will see with SharePoint 2010 is better ability to manage the Information Architecture, a key ingredient for Governance. We now have the ability to create reusable Information Architectures across sites and farms as well as created dedicated ones.
• Second you will notice that Search has been centralized as part of the default application group and has been made a resource to all the sites. This is because it is a resource intensive process and it is not likely you will be creating dedicated search farms for a specific site. Note that FAST search cannot be used in this manner. FAST can either be used behind the firewall or outside but the same servers cannot be used for both.
• Third application services have been distributed and dedicated. For instance Excel Services, BCS, Access Service, etc. are broken out.

Advantages:

• Supports the ability for multiple goals to be met in the same farm.
• Provides the ability to have better isolation of services. This provides the ability to have a granular implementation that better support scalability, performance and security.
• Allows for divisional, department, or program administration.

Disadvantages:

• Complex configuration to manage.
• Requires more Governance and administration.
• Will require more hardware/virtual resources to host.

Recommendations:

• This configuration is good for a small SharePoint implementation within a department, division or business unit.

Multi-Farm

In this farm configuration we have broken it out and created several independent SharePoint farms that still use central services farm.

Observations:

• Sites have been separated into dedicated farms based on usage such as public internet, extranet, internet and intranet.
• Each farm has dedicated application groups of services that specific to their use.
• All the farms have access to shared services in central services farm.

Advantages:

• There is a clear separation between the sites by placing them in dedicated farms. This is very important because publishing farms and collaboration farms have been separated.
• Organizations can be segregated from each other and prevents the initiatives of one from interfering with the initiatives of another.
• Farms can be configured with service groups that are specific to their needs.
• Central services can still be shared across farms where it makes sense.

Disadvantages:

• A more complex configuration that requires more considerable time to administer and govern.

Recommendations:

• This is an enterprise farm configuration.
• This configuration should be implemented when a company has the need to optimize administration and hosting at the enterprise level.
• This configuration is needed when data and services need to be isolated but there is still opportunity for reuse.

Multi-Farm with Application Service Partitioning

This farm configuration introduces service partitioning into the pervious diagram. Service partition is introduced in the previous blog in this series. It is recommended that all services be partitioned when they are initially set up, even if one partitioned is only used. It is not possible to change a service to allow for partitioning after it has been started in an un-partitioned state.

Observations:

• In this diagram you will see in Farm A both the Managed Metadata and Business Connectivity Services have been partitioned. Others could have but just selected these for discussion. Now Farms B through E and utilize partitions that are just for them and they will have isolation.
• Notice in Farm D we were able to remove those services from the configuration. This makes the management of that farm less complex.
• Notice in Farm E we kept the Managed Metadata service. There is nothing from stopping that and can still be considered completely legitimate. For instance the administrator in Farm C does not have access to Farm A, and all they are using from Farm A is a partition of Managed Metadata that all the farms are using. If that is the case, they may want to still have a Managed Metadata service in Farm C so that they can make tactical additions to the Information Architecture.

Advantages:

• Provides even more granularity and isolation of data management within SharePoint 2010.

Disadvantages:

• Again an even more complex scenario for managing services for an enterprise farm.

Recommendations:

• Using service partitioning must be a strategy considered when setting up an enterprise SharePoint 2010 farm.

Hosted Partitioned Farm

The last farm configuration I will introduce to you is the concept of a completely hosted farm. This is a very interesting scenario because you were not empowered to do this very well with SharePoint 2007. Some SharePoint service companies provided SharePoint hosted solutions but given what was available in SharePoint 2007. Now with SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Azure those limitations have been removed.

Observations:

• This scenario should not just be considered for providing SharePoint 2010 hosted solutions by a services company. A company itself can consider creating a solution like this for creating on demand solutions for provisioning full farms in a rapid fashion.
• This scenario would also make sense for a parent company that has many subsidiary companies that they want to service in an economical fashion.
• As you will notice this approach heavily uses service partitioning. The goal is to make the farms as lightweight as possible.

Advantages:

• Utilizes many of the enterprise best practices discussed so far.
• Since partitioning is utilized, there is isolation of data between farms.
• Governance and administration is centralized into a single location and is not spread across farms.

Disadvantages:

• Because all services are centralized, it is not possible to create customizations at the farm level. This means that if a farm has a special functional, performance or security requirement it may be hard to support that requirement.

Recommendations:

• If you are creating a hosted solution and the expectations can be set ahead of time this is a good approach. However this is very hard to do and more often than not there will be requirements that will require dedicated services within the farms. It is ok to set out with this in mind but you must remain flexible to support an architecture like the one in the previous section.

What’s Next

In the next part of this series we will continue this line of discussion but for the physical topology of SharePoint 2010. We will focus on what is a small, medium and large farms.

References

• Topologies for SharePoint Server 2010 - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=FD686CBB-8401-4F25-B65E-3CE7AA7DBEAB&displaylang=en
• Services in SharePoint 2010 Products - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=B9CA7745-FFA4-43CA-A638-E1AD868187CE&displaylang=en
• Cross-farm Services in SharePoint 2010 Products - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5141C91C-0922-44FC-AAF4-64C5156209EF&displaylang=en
• Hosting Environments for SharePoint 2010 Products - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=326845D1-95DB-4E55-B65A-21850S9DEBE24&displaylang=en

SharePoint 2010 Service Architecture

•SharePoint 2010 Service Architecture
•SharePoint 2010 Logical Architecture
•SharePoint 2010 Architecture and Design Models

•SharePoint 2010 Performance and Capacity Case Studies

•SharePoint 2010 Capacity Planning

•SharePoint 2010 Cache Strategies

•SharePoint 2010 Databases

•SharePoint 2010 Physical Topology

Introduction

Recently I wrote a series of blogs on Enterprise Search and FAST ESP with the intention of having a deep dive into SharePoint Search 2010. There are many changes to both the logical and physical topologies of SharePoint 2010. Most of the readers of this blog series are very familiar with SharePoint 2007 but not so much with SharePoint 2010 (since it is in beta). Before doing a deep dive into SharePoint Search 2010 we need to have a good grasp of the changes for SharePoint 2010.
A well architected logical and physical SharePoint environment tends to revolve around Search. Search tended to drive much of the logical and physical architectures for SharePoint 2007. In this blog series I am going to do an introduction to the SharePoint 2010 services, logical and physical architectures. It is critical to have this worked out from the beginning because the SharePoint architecture must scale with the business. What we have seen is once SharePoint is implemented; it becomes highly adopted.

SharePoint 2010 Versions
In SharePoint 2007 the versions we became very familiar with were:

• Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)
• MOSS 2007 Standard
• MOSS 2007 Enterprise

For SharePoint 2010 it has changed to:

• SharePoint Foundation Services
• SharePoint Server 2010 Standard
• SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise

Tier Architecture

SharePoint 2010 has not changed from a Tier perspective. There are Web, Application and Database tiers. What’s important is it to understand is how to architect those tiers. For SharePoint 2010 the Application tier has changed significantly as it is more sophisticated than what was available in SharePoint 2007. Some things that we will get into within this series are creating service farms and partitioned services.

Service Application

Important changes that you should be aware of:

1. In SharePoint 2007 there was Shared Service Providers (SSP) which was used to host services. SSPs have been completely removed from SharePoint 2010 and services can be run independently.
2. Some services in SharePoint 2010 will be referred to as Service Applications. Not all services in Central Administration are Service Applications. In the table below, you will see which services are considered to be Service Applications. You will see a trend that Service Applications tend to map to major features of SharePoint rather than services which could be considered part of the infrastructure of SharePoint.
3. Service Groups have been introduced to logically manage Service Applications. When Service Applications are added they will be included in a Default Group. Web Applications can use that Default Group or use a Custom Group of Service Applications. What this provides is greater control of which Service Applications are available to specific web applications. If you are familiar with SharePoint 2007, the Service Group concept is one of the reasons we created different SSPs because sometimes we needed to create barriers between web applications.
4. SharePoint 2010 services can be reused within and across farms. This was not available in SharePoint 2007 and provides a significant amount of scalability options.
5. SharePoint 2010 supports Service Partitioning. If you are familiar with database partitioning, think of it is horizontal partitioning of data within a SharePoint service. Not all services support service partitioning; partitioning is only used in services that are data driven. A typical scenario is that a centrally managed/cross farm service with data that should not be exposed to all subscribing farms. If that is the case, a farm would subscribe to a partition of centrally managed service. In SharePoint lingo each partition is referred to as a “tenant”.

Knowing what we now know, when scaling out these services we will take the following into consideration:

• Multiple instances of the same Service Applications can be initiated within a farm.
• Service Applications are shared across Web Applications within a farm by Service Group.
• Some Service Applications can be shared across multiple farms while others cannot.
• Service Groups can logically contain Service Applications that reside in other farms.
• Web Applications have the flexibility to use multiple instances of the same type of Service Application (regardless of which farm hosts that service).
• Service Applications can have its data partitioned and only accessible to specific subscribers.
• Service Groups can be used to logically scale for performance, security and scalability.

Some side notes:

• Service Applications are hosted within IIS. It is possible to have Service Applications deployed to different application pools to achieve process isolation (important for both security and fault tolerance). So it is possible to have a single machine host many services and isolation between them.
• Each Service Application instance has a Connection which Web Applications connect to. Web Applications use these Connections (sometimes referred to as proxies) to send and retrieve data from a Service Application.
• If the same type of Service Application is used more than once in a single Web Application, one of the Connections will be marked as the primary.
• Services are deployed through the Configuration Wizard, Central Admin and using Windows PowerShell. Services can be managed through Central Admin and PowerShell.

Given this flexibility in service configuration you now can:

• Have better ability to share dedicated services across regional locations.
• Have the ability to create dedicated services by business unit. For instance a Finance Web Application may have a dedicated Excel Services Service Application instance while a different Excel Services Service Application instance may be available to the rest of the farm.
• Now have greater control to ensure that data cannot be shared between logical groups of users. For instance lock down departmental or intranet data.
• Have the ability to support hosted models in a more secure and efficient manner.
• Service Applications that have expensive operations, like Search, can be centralized and reused across farms.

We will put these rules for Service Applications into action in the next part of this series.

SharePoint 2010 Services

In SharePoint 2007 we commonly had to configure the following services:

• Document Conversions Launcher Service
• Document Conversions Load Balancer Service
• Excel Calculation Services
• Office SharePoint Server Search
• Windows SharePoint Services Help Search
• Windows SharePoint Services Web Application

In many cases with SharePoint 2007 implementations services were not configured correctly. This resulted in poor performance and the inability to scale to meet business demand. Many people implementing SharePoint 2007 did not understand that both a logical and physical architectures have to be aligned to how SharePoint services will be utilized. This will be a problem for many on the 2010 platform.

As discussed the service architecture has changed for SharePoint 2010 in many ways. Before we dive into all of the strategies of how services should be aligned in both the logical and physical architectures let us understand what the new services are.

Here is a list of services for SharePoint 2010. I found several pieces of information and I manually created this table with the information that I have.

Services	Description	Service Application	Cross Farm	Partitioning	Available On
Access Database Services	New service that allows for viewing, editing and interacting with MS Access through a browser.	Yes	No	Yes **	SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise
Application Registry Service	Enables users to search and collaborate around business data. Provides backward compatibility to BDC service.	No	No	NA	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
Business Data Connectivity	Access to line of business systems. Service now supports writing to data services.	Yes	Yes	Yes	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
Central Administration	Central Admin Site	No	No	NA	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
Document Conversions Launcher Service	Schedules and initiates document conversions.	No	No	NA	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
Document Conversions Load Balancer Service	Balances document conversions across the SharePoint farm.	No	No	NA	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
Excel Calculation Services	Ability to interact with Excel files in a browser. New extended functionality.	Yes	No	No	SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise
Lotus Notes Connector	Index service connector to index Lotus Notes Domino Servers.	Yes	Yes	Yes	SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and up
InfoPath Service	Supports hosting InfoPath forms in SharePoint.	No	Yes	Yes **	SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise
Managed Metadata Service	New service that manages taxonomy structures and definitions.	Yes	Yes	Yes	SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and up
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming E-mail	Email service. This will run on the machine where the web application is running.	No	No	NA	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Services	New service used to track subscription IDs and settings for services that deployed in partition mode.	Yes	NA	NA	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation User Code Service	New service runs code deployed as part of a sandbox solution and runs in restricted mode. Must be started on any machine in the farm that needs to run Sandbox code.	No	NA	NA	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application	The service that runs the web application.	No	No	NA	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Workflow Timer Service	Responsible for running timer jobs.	No	No	NA	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
PerformancePoint	BI Dashboard services.	Yes	No	NA	SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise
PowerPoint	New services that allows viewing, editing and broadcasting PowerPoint in a browser.	Yes	No	Yes **	SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise
Project	Host project server 2010.	Yes	No	Yes	Additional server product.
Search Query and Site Settings Service	Service that performs a query across built indexes.	Yes	Yes	Yes*	SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and up
Secure Store Service	Service provide SSO authentication.	Yes	Yes	Yes	SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and up
SharePoint Foundation Search	Service that provides search capabilities for SharePoint Foundation Search only. For SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Enterprise this service will perform online Help search.	No	No	NA	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up.
SharePoint Server Search	Crawls content, creates indexes and performs queries. Automatically configured.	Yes	Yes	Yes*	SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and up
State Service	New services that provides temporary storage of user session data for SharePoint components.	Yes	No	Yes **	SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and up
Usage and Health Data Collection	Reporting services that provide farm wide usage and health.	Yes	No	Yes	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
User Profile	New and expanded social networking services and features.	Yes	Yes	Yes	SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and up
User Profile Synchronization Service	Synchronizes user and group profile information that is stored in the SharePoint Server 2010 profile store with profile information that is stored in directory services across the enterprise. Works with AD, BDC, Novel LDAP and Sun LDAP (more info).	Yes	Yes	Yes	SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and up
Visio Graphics Service	Ability to view published Visio diagrams in a browser.	Yes	No	Yes **	SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise
Web Analytics Data Processing Service	Captures data for analytics.	Yes	Yes	Yes	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
Web Analytics Web Service	Web service interfaces for analytics.	Yes	Yes	Yes	SharePoint Foundation 2010 and up
Word Automation Services	Service that performs automated bulk document conversions.	Yes	No	Yes **	SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Up

* FAST Search cannot be partitioned.
** Supports partitioning but is not needed because there is no tenant data.

Next
In the next blog we will actually jump into the topologies of SharePoint farms (with diagrams) based on the information captured we have gone over.

References

• Topologies for SharePoint Server 2010 - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=FD686CBB-8401-4F25-B65E-3CE7AA7DBEAB&displaylang=en
• Services in SharePoint 2010 Products - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=B9CA7745-FFA4-43CA-A638-E1AD868187CE&displaylang=en
• Cross-farm Services in SharePoint 2010 Products - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5141C91C-0922-44FC-AAF4-64C5156209EF&displaylang=en
• Hosting Environments for SharePoint 2010 Products - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=326845D1-95DB-4E55-B65A-21850S9DEBE24&displaylang=en

SharePoint 2010 Topologies

As we all know SharePoint is exceedingly scalable but like all things in IT systems you need to start with a solid foundation and foresight of where you are going with your install to have a successful experience. Through this post I will cover Limited Deployments and then move on to Small Farm Topologies. Please do not forget that these examples are exactly that only guidelines and with all things SharePoint one size does not fit all so experiment and see what works for you but please build your SharePoint with growth in mind and do not get painted into a corner with nowhere to go.

Single Server Deployment

The illustration below covers a limited deployment and is only recommended for testing with all SharePoint roles and SQL installed on one box this is only recommended for testing with less than 100 users.

Two Server Deployments

This is a great starting point for a SharePoint farm as this will allow you to scale your deployment out by adding another front end server and application server at a later date. This scenario is recommended for up to 10,000 users.

Through this post I will cover two tier farms, three tier farms and also three tier farm optimized for search. But before I begin I thought I would go back to basics with advice for hardware required to run SharePoint 2010 effectively. So for your SharePoint servers both web front end and application server the recommendations are as follows:-  

• 64 bit, dual processor, 3GHz
• 8 GB RAM
• Minimal 100 GB disk space
• DVD Drive
• Network / Internet Connectivity

And for your database servers:-

• 64 bit environment
• Windows Server 2008 Enterprise + Service Pack 2
• SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3 + Cumulative Update 3
• SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 + Cumulative Update 2

Two tier small farm

A two tier farm is predicated to support between 10,000 and 20,000 users with a dedicated SQL server for all SharePoint databases.

Three tier farm

This is very much the classic SharePoint architecture with 2 web front end servers a application server and a dedicated SQL server for all databases.

Three tier farms optimized for search

This is the classic setup but with a dedicated SQL server for the search databases this topology is recommended for farms with up to 10 million items to index.

HOW TO: Create a Sharepoint 2010 VM in 32 bits host machine

The objetive of this serie of posts is to explain in detail how to create a 64 bits virtual machine with Sharepoint 2010 in a 32 bits host machine.

The first thing we have to do is download all the necessary software for our Sharepoint 2010 VM.  This is the list of software we need:

1.       SUN VirtualBox 3.0: this software enables create 64 bits guest machine into 32 bits host machines. You can download this free software from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads.

2.       Microsoft Windows Server 2008 64 bits: you can download a trial version from Microsoft site (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/trial-software.aspx).

3.       Microsoft SQL Server 2008 64 bits: you can download a trial version from Microsoft site (http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/trial-software.aspx).

Before we can start the installation we have to enable Intel® VT and AMD-V virtualizations extension in BIOS. You must open the BIOS setup utility of your computer, then access the processor section and enable intel®virtualization technology or AMD-V.

Now that we already have all the necessary software to create the virtual machine, we are going to start installing VirtualBox 3.0.

I won’t explain the steps to install VirtualBox. You have all the necessary information in the user manual (http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/UserManual.html).

Once we have installed VirtualBox we’re going to create the virtual machine:

1.       Run VirtualBox 3.0: double click in desktop icon.

2.       Click New and you’ll see the wizard window:

3.       Once you have created the shared folder you are able to access its content through the windows explorer of the VM with the following URL \\vboxsvr\<shared folder name>:

 

3.       Introduce the VM name (for example “Sharepoint 2010”) and select the OS version (Microsoft Windows 2008 64 bit):

4.       Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2010 TP: you only can obtain this software through the Microsoft Technical Preview Program.

5.       Microsoft Office 2010 TP: you only can obtain this software through the Microsoft Technical Preview Program.

4.       Next define the RAM memory to asign to VM:

5.       Next define the name, size and location of a new virtual disk:

6.       Finally click Finish is the summary windows and you’ll have your VM created:

Now we have the VM ready to install all the software. First of all we have to install Windows Server 2008 64 bit:

1.       Select the VM is VirtualBox and click Configuration button.

2.       Select CD/DVD-ROM section and introduce the location of the ISO image file downloaded from Microsoft site:

3.       Save the changes and the Start button to iniciate the VM

4.       VirtualBox will execute the installation of Windows Server 2008. Select language, date format and keyboard and click Next:

5.       Wait till all steps of installation have been completed and then enter the new password for Administrator.

6.       Once you have logged in the VM, change other settings like date and time, keyboard, display resolution, etc.

Finally you have to install Sun VirtualBox Guest Addtions 3.0 clicking In the option Install Guest Additions of the Devices menu:

After the installation you must restart the virtual machine.

Continuing with the installation of our Sharepoint 2010 VM, in this post we’re going to install SQL Server 2008.

Before we can start, we need to create a shared forlder in order to access the installation software stored in the host machine.

To create a shared folder:

1.       Click in Shared Folder option of the devices menu of your VM.

2.       Click the icon to create a new Shared folder and select the path of your host machine where you have downloaded the SQL Server 2008 software:

12.   Next you have to enter the account for SQL Server Administration:

13.   Next you have to decide if send errors and logs to Microsoft:

14.   Then installation rules are checked:

15.   Next a installation summary is shown and when you click Install the installation process begins:

16.   After installation is finished you are able to view the log file:

Finally we’re going to install Sharepoint Server 2010 TP.

Before we proceed with the installantion, we’ll create a second virtual disk to stored all data.

To create a second virtual disk:

1.       With the VM off, click in Configuration button and select virtual disks section:

2.       Click the icon to create a new Virtual Disk and select the path and size of the virtual disk:

3.       Then click Ok in the configuration window of VM.

4.       Then start the VM, run the Server Manager and message box will be shown to activate the new disk. Click Ok and create a volume with the new disk:

5.       Finally run the SQL Management Studio, open the Server Properties, select the Database Settings section and change the Database Default Location to a path of the new virtual disk:

11.   Next you have to enter the account credentials for different services:

10.   Next disk space requirements are cheked:

9.       Next you have to select the instance ID and the instance root directory:

7.       If no errors ocurres you can change to the Installation section and execute the stand-alone installation.

8.       First you have to select the feature you want to install:

6.       In the planning section you have to execute the System Configuration Checker:

3.       SQL Server 2008 also requires Hotfix KB942288. Click ok in the message box and the Hotfix will be installed.

4.       At this point you must restart the virtual machine.

5.       After you restart the virtual machine you must execute Setup again, and this time the SQL Server Installation center is opened:

Now we are ready to install SQL Server 2008 64 bit:

1.       Execute the Setup program.

2.       A message box is shown advicing you that SQL Server 2008 requires Microsoft .NET framework 3.5 SP1. Click Ok and .NET framework will be installed: