EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for Virtualized SharePoint · Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with...

DESIGN GUIDE

EMC VSPEX

Abstract

This Design Guide describes how to design virtualized SharePoint resources on the appropriate EMC® VSPEX™ private cloud solutions for Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere™. This Design Guide also illustrates how to use the available VSPEX Sizing Tool, allocate resources following best practices, and leverage all the benefits that VSPEX offers.

January 2013

EMC VSPEX FOR VIRTUALIZED MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT 2010

EMC VSPEX for Virtualized Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Design Guide

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Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA.

Published January 2013

EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice.

The information in this publication is provided as is. EMC Corporation makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license.

EMC2, EMC, and the EMC logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

For the most up-to-date regulatory document for your product line, go to the technical documentation and advisories section on the EMC online support website.


Part Number H11230


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Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction ........................................................................ 11

Purpose of this guide .................................................................................. 12

Business value ............................................................................................ 12

Scope .......................................................................................................... 13

Audience ..................................................................................................... 13

Terminology ................................................................................................ 14

Chapter 2 Before You Start .................................................................. 15

Documentation workflow overview .............................................................. 16

Essential reading ......................................................................................... 16

Solution Overviews .............................................................................................. 16

Implementation Guides for SharePoint ................................................................. 16

VSPEX Proven Infrastructure ................................................................................. 16

Chapter 3 Solution Overview ............................................................... 19

Overview ..................................................................................................... 20

Solution architecture ................................................................................... 20

Key components .......................................................................................... 21

Introduction ......................................................................................................... 21

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 .................................................................................. 22

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 ................................................................................... 22

EMC VSPEX .......................................................................................................... 24

VMware vSphere 5.1 ............................................................................................ 25

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V ...................................................... 25

EMC VNX and EMC VNXe ...................................................................................... 26

EMC Avamar ......................................................................................................... 27

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator for VMware ........................................................... 28

VNX VMware vStorage API for Array Integration support ....................................... 28

EMC Storage Integrator ........................................................................................ 29

Contents


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Chapter 4 Choosing a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure .............................. 31

Overview ..................................................................................................... 32

Step 1: Evaluate the customer use case ....................................................... 32

Step 2: Design the application architectures ................................................ 34

VSPEX Sizing Tool ................................................................................................ 34

Step 3: Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure .................................. 38

Considerations ..................................................................................................... 38

Examples ............................................................................................................. 39

Chapter 5 Solution Design Considerations and Best Practices .............. 47

Overview ..................................................................................................... 48

Network design considerations ................................................................... 48

Overview of network design considerations ......................................................... 48

Design best practices ........................................................................................... 49

Storage layout and design considerations ................................................... 50

Overview .............................................................................................................. 50


Storage layout examples ...................................................................................... 57

Virtualization design considerations ............................................................ 60

Overview .............................................................................................................. 60


Application design considerations ............................................................... 61

Overview of application design considerations .................................................... 61


Backup and recovery considerations ........................................................... 64

Considerations ..................................................................................................... 64

Minimum backup software and hardware requirements ....................................... 65

Chapter 6 Solution Validation Methodologies ...................................... 69

Baseline hardware validation methodology ................................................. 70

Application validation methodology ............................................................ 70

Defining the test scenarios ................................................................................... 71

Understanding key metrics................................................................................... 72

Creating the test environment .............................................................................. 73

Populating the database ...................................................................................... 74

Running tests, analyzing results, and optimization .............................................. 74

Backup and recovery validation methodology .............................................. 75

Validating the backup and recovery plan ............................................................. 75

Test tools .................................................................................................... 76


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Sample tool to create large number of random documents .................................. 76

Sample tool to load documents into SharePoint ................................................... 76

Sample code for SharePoint performance testing ................................................. 76

Appendix A References.......................................................................... 77

White papers ............................................................................................... 78

Product documentation ............................................................................... 78

Other documentation .................................................................................. 78

Links ........................................................................................................... 79

Appendix B Qualification Worksheet and VSPEX Sizing Tool ................... 81

Qualification worksheet............................................................................... 82

How to print the worksheet for customer use ....................................................... 83

SharePoint Server 2010 concepts ................................................................ 84

SharePoint 2010 fundamentals ........................................................................... 84

SharePoint 2010 Search Service .......................................................................... 85

VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint ................................................................. 87

How to use the VSPEX Sizing Tool ........................................................................ 87

Boundaries and supported limits ......................................................................... 90

RPS calculation methodology ............................................................................... 91

Estimate content database size ........................................................................... 92

Contents


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Figures

Figure 1. Architecture of the validated infrastructure ......................................... 21 Figure 2. SharePoint 2010 server topology ........................................................ 23 Figure 3. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure ............................................................... 24 Figure 4. Required resources example: VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for small

SharePoint farm ................................................................................. 42 Figure 5. Required resources example: VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for medium

SharePoint farm ................................................................................. 45 Figure 6. Network layer: High availability (VNXe) ............................................... 48 Figure 7. Network layer: High availability (VNX) ................................................. 49 Figure 8. SharePoint storage elements on VMware vSphere 5.1 platform .......... 51 Figure 9. SharePoint storage elements on Hyper-V platform .............................. 53 Figure 10. Storage layout example: SharePoint farm for the VNXe Series ............ 58 Figure 11. Storage layout example: SharePoint farm for VNX Series .................... 59 Figure 12. Installation map ................................................................................. 65 Figure 13. SharePoint 2010 content structure ..................................................... 85 Figure 14. EMC VSPEX Sizing Tool: All Analyses .................................................. 87 Figure 15. EMC VSPEX Sizing Tool: Create Analysis page ..................................... 87 Figure 16. SharePoint farm sizing: Sample page ................................................. 88 Figure 17. EMC VSPEX Sizing Tool: SharePoint questionnaire .............................. 88 Figure 18. Details information: Example page for SharePoint farm ...................... 89 Figure 19. VSPEX Data page: Example of detailed information ............................ 90

Figures


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Tables

Table 1. Terminology ........................................................................................ 14 Table 2. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for SharePoint deployment process ........ 16 Table 3. Reference virtual machine—characteristics ......................................... 25 Table 4. VNX customer benefits ....................................................................... 26 Table 5. VNXe customer benefits ..................................................................... 26 Table 6. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure selection steps ....................................... 32 Table 7. VSPEX SharePoint qualification worksheet questionnaire ................... 33 Table 8. VSPEX Sizing Tool output .................................................................... 35 Table 9. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure: Selection steps ..................................... 39 Table 10. Example qualification worksheet: Small SharePoint farm ................... 39 Table 11. Example of required resources: Small SharePoint farm ....................... 40 Table 12. Example of SharePoint farm details in VSPEX Sizing Tool .................... 41 Table 13. Example of performance key metrics: Small SharePoint farm .............. 41 Table 14. Example VSPEX qualification worksheet: Medium SharePoint farm ..... 43 Table 15. Example of required resources: Medium SharePoint farm ................... 43 Table 16. Example summary : Medium SharePoint farm in VSPEX Sizing Tool .... 44 Table 17. Example performance key metrics: Medium SharePoint farm .............. 44 Table 18. SharePoint related storage pools name and the purpose .................... 52 Table 19. Recommended RAM for SQL Server ..................................................... 60 Table 20. Hardware requirements for backup ..................................................... 65 Table 21. Services and writers used by Avamar plug-in for SharePoint VSS ........ 68 Table 22. High-level steps for application validation .......................................... 70 Table 23. General operations ............................................................................. 71 Table 24. Mixed workload .................................................................................. 72 Table 25. Qualification worksheet for a SharePoint farm .................................... 82 Table 26. SharePoint 2010 fundamental concepts ............................................. 84 Table 27. SharePoint search service concepts ................................................... 85 Table 28. Limitation and boundaries in the VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint .... 91 Table 29. Formula to estimate content database size ......................................... 92

Tables


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Chapter 1 Introduction

This chapter presents the following topics:

Purpose of this guide ................................................................................. 12

Business value .......................................................................................... 12

Scope ........................................................................................................ 13

Audience ................................................................................................... 13

Terminology ............................................................................................... 14

Introduction


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Purpose of this guide EMC® VSPEX™ Proven Infrastructures are optimized for virtualizing critical business applications. VSPEX gives customers the ability to plan and design the virtual assets required to support Microsoft SharePoint in a virtualized environment on a VSPEX private cloud infrastructure.

The VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint architecture provides customers with a modern system, capable of hosting a virtualized SharePoint solution at a consistent performance level. This solution runs on VMware vSphere™ or Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization layer, backed by the highly available EMC VNX® family, which provides the storage. The compute and network components, while vendor-definable, are laid out to be redundant and are sufficiently powerful to handle the processing and data needs of the virtual machine environment.

This Design Guide describes how to design a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint with best practices and how to select the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure with the EMC VSPEX Sizing Tool for sizing guidance.

Business value The volume and diversity of content and the size of user data continues to grow year over year. Data is exploding, with a 50 times growth rate forecasted over the next 10 years. To realize the value in all of this data, businesses are turning to content management applications to promote collaboration and information sharing. For over ten years, SharePoint has been helping customers to develop portals for collaboration, to manage documents and records, search and share documents, and develop business process automation around their most valuable asset—their information.

As SharePoint has developed and continued to add new functionality and features, the challenges that businesses face in managing their data have also grown. Administering, auditing, protecting, managing, and delivering an optimal SharePoint infrastructure for a modern, geographically diverse work force is a major challenge for most IT departments. Virtualization of physical servers and storage assets with VSPEX enables IT departments to be more dynamic, and agile, and to keep pace with ever-changing demands on the business.

VSPEX enables customers to accelerate their IT transformation with faster deployments, simplified management, backup, and storage provisioning. Customers can realize greater efficiency with higher application availability, increased storage utilization, and faster and leaner backups. In addition, VSPEX provides customers with choices when selecting a hypervisor, server, and network to address the requirements of their unique SharePoint environments.

Introduction


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Scope This Design Guide describes how to design a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint for Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere. Furthermore, this guide illustrates how to use the available VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint, allocate resources following best practices, and leverage all the benefits that VSPEX offers.

Audience This guide is intended for internal EMC personnel and qualified EMC VSPEX partners. The guide assumes that VSPEX partners who intend to deploy this solution are:

Qualified by Microsoft to sell and implement SharePoint solutions

Certified in SharePoint 2010 with one or both of the following Microsoft certifications:

Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) - Microsoft SharePoint 2010 - Configuring (Exam: 667)

Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) - SharePoint Administration 2010 (Exam: 668)

Qualified by EMC to sell, install, and configure the EMC VNX family of storage systems

Certified for selling VSPEX Proven Infrastructures

Qualified to sell, install, and configure the network and server products required for VSPEX Proven Infrastructures

Readers must also have the necessary technical training and background to install and configure:

VMware vSphere or Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V as virtualization platforms

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

Optional: EMC next-generation backup, which includes EMC Avamar® and EMC Data Domain®

External references are provided where applicable and EMC recommends that readers are familiar with these documents. For details, see Essential reading.

Introduction


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Terminology Table 1includes the terminology used in this guide.

Table 1. Terminology

Term Definition

ACL Access control list

AD Active Directory

BLOB Binary large object

CSV Cluster-shared volume

DRS Distributed Resource Scheduler

GLR Granular-level recovery

IIS Internet Information Services

IOPS Input/output operations per second

LUN Logical unit number

NIC Network interface card

NFS Network file system

NLB Network Load Balancing

NL-SAS Near-line serial-attached SCSI

RDM Raw device mapping

RPS Requests per second

SSIS SQL Server Integration Services

tempdb Tempdb refers to a system database used by Microsoft SQL Server as a temporary working area during processing.

UAC User Account Control

VAAI VMware vStorage API for Array Integration

VHDX Hyper-V virtual hard disk format

VMDK Virtual machine data file

VMFS Virtual machine file system

VSS Volume Shadow (Copy) Service

VSTS Microsoft Visual Studio Team System


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Chapter 2 Before You Start


Documentation workflow overview ............................................................. 16

Essential reading ....................................................................................... 16

Before You Start


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Documentation workflow overview EMC recommends that you refer to the process flow in Table 2 to design and implement your VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for SharePoint.

Table 2. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for SharePoint deployment process

Step Action

1 Use the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint qualification worksheet to collect user requirements. The one-page Qualification worksheet is in Appendix B of this Design Guide.

2 Use the VSPEX Sizing Tool to determine the recommended VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for SharePoint 2010 based on the user requirements collected in Step 1. For more information about the VSPEX Sizing Tool, refer to the VSPEX Sizing Tool on the EMC Business Value Portal.

Note: You need to register the first time you access the tool.

3 To determine your final design for the SharePoint VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, refer to this Design Guide.

Note: Ensure that all application requirements are considered, and not just this particular application.

4 To select and order the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, refer to the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure section.

5 To deploy and test your VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for SharePoint 2010, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint section.

Essential reading EMC recommends that you read the following documents, available on EMC.com and EMC Online Support.

Refer to the following VSPEX Solution Overview documents:

EMC VSPEX Server Virtualization for Midmarket Businesses

EMC VSPEX Server Virtualization for Small and Medium Businesses

Refer to the following VSPEX Implementation Guides:

EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for Virtualized SharePoint 2010 with Microsoft Hyper-V

EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for Virtualized SharePoint 2010 with VMware vSphere

Refer to the following VSPEX Proven Infrastructures:

EMC VSPEX Private Cloud VMware vSphere 5.1 for up to 100 Virtual Machines Enabled by Microsoft Windows Server 2012, EMC VNXe, and EMC Next-Generation Backup

Solution Overviews

Implementation Guides for SharePoint

VSPEX Proven Infrastructure

http://express.salire.com/go/emc

Before You Start


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EMC VSPEX Private Cloud VMware vSphere 5.1 for up to 250 Virtual Machines Enabled by Microsoft Windows Server 2012,EMC VNX, and EMC Next-Generation Backup

EMC VSPEX Private Cloud Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V for up to 100 Virtual Machines Enabled by EMC VNXe and EMC Next-Generation Backup

Before You Start


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Chapter 3 Solution Overview


Overview ................................................................................................... 20

Solution architecture ................................................................................. 20

Key components ........................................................................................ 21

Solution Overview


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Overview This chapter provides an overview of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and the key technologies used in this solution. The solution described in this Design Guide includes the servers, storage, network components, and SharePoint components that focus on small and medium business private cloud environments.

The solution enables customers to quickly and consistently deploy a virtualized SharePoint farm in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. The reference architecture will support the reference virtual machine resources, based on the sizing guidance in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, and combine with additional storage for the SharePoint application data.

This Design Guide can help customers to deploy a simple, effective, and flexible SharePoint solution on a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. The guidance applies to all VSPEX Proven Infrastructures, including both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Solution architecture Figure 1 shows the architecture that characterizes the validated infrastructure for the support of a SharePoint 2010 overlay on a VSPEX infrastructure. All SharePoint servers—web server, application server, and SQL Server—are deployed as virtual machines on VMware vSphere 5.1 or Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V. We1 used the VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint to determine the number of, and the detailed compute resources for, each SharePoint server role and the recommended storage layout for SharePoint 2010, in addition to the virtual infrastructure pool in the EMC VNX® or EMC VNXe® series. The optional backup and recovery components of the solution provide SharePoint data protection, ranging from the entire SharePoint farm to various object levels.

1 In this guide, "we" refers to the EMC Solutions engineering team that validated the solution.

Solution Overview


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Figure 1. Architecture of the validated infrastructure

Key components

This section provides an overview of the key technologies used in this solution:

Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Microsoft SQL Server 2012

EMC VSPEX:


Reference virtual machine

VMware vSphere 5.1

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V

EMC VNX and EMC VNXe Series

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator for VMware

EMC VNX VMware vStorage API for Array Integration Support

ESI Storage Integrator

EMC Avamar (optional)

Introduction

Solution Overview


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Microsoft SharePoint 2010 provides a business-collaboration platform for enterprise and commercial organizations. SharePoint enables organizations to share content and information through websites, blogs, wikis, and document libraries—some of the many features of a SharePoint environment. Content within these features can be managed collectively from start to finish.

The SharePoint 2010 platform comprises a rich set of integrated capabilities that can be used either out of the box or customized to address specific business needs and integrated with other products and solutions. The platform can be deployed both within the organization (through intranets) and outside of the firewall (through extranets and the Internet) to enable interaction with employees, customers, and business partners. Thoughts and ideas can be easily exchanged and discussed using the same set of capabilities and tools.

A SharePoint environment consists of multiple server roles combined into units called farms. The SharePoint 2010 farm in this solution includes the following server roles:

Web server role: This server is responsible for the actual SharePoint pages that a user views. The role of the web server is to host web pages, web services, and the web parts that are required to process requests from users. The web server directs these requests to the application server, which returns the results to the web server.

Application server role: This server runs all the SharePoint application services, including index crawling and search query services, and also hosts the SharePoint Central Administration website. You can add application servers to host services that can be deployed to a single server and used by all the servers in a farm. Services with similar usage and performance characteristics can be logically grouped on a server and, if necessary, hosted on multiple servers if a scale out is required to respond to performance or capacity requirements.

Database server role: These are servers that run the SharePoint databases, including the content databases, configuration database, search databases, and so on. For this solution, we installed SQL Server 2012 with a back-end database role for SharePoint 2010.

SQL Server 2012 is Microsoft’s database management and analysis system for e-commerce, line-of-business, and data warehousing solutions. SQL Server is widely used to store, retrieve, and manage application data. Because it is used with a range of applications, and each application has different requirements for performance, sizing, availability, recoverability, manageability, and so on, it is important to fully understand these factors and plan accordingly when deploying SQL Server.

SharePoint Server 2010 is built on the SQL Server database engine and most of the content and SharePoint configurations are stored in the SQL Server databases. In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint, we used SQL Server 2012 as the back-end database application. SharePoint Server 2010 uses the following types of SQL Server databases:

Microsoft SharePoint 2010

Microsoft SQL Server 2012

Solution Overview


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Configuration databases: The configuration database and Central Administration content database are called configuration databases. They contain data about farm settings such as the databases used, Internet Information Services (IIS) websites or web applications, solutions, web part packages, site templates, default quota, and blocked file types. A SharePoint farm can have only one set of configuration databases.

Content databases: Content databases store all site content: site documents, such as files in document libraries, list data, web part properties, and user names and rights. All the data for a specific site resides in one content database. Each web application can contain many content databases. Each site collection can be associated with only one content database, although a content database can be associated with many site collections.

Service application related databases: Service application databases store data for use by a service application. The databases for service applications vary significantly in how they are used.

Figure 2 shows the server roles in the SharePoint farm and the related service components that we validated in this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for SharePoint. For detailed information about basic SharePoint 2010 concepts, refer to the SharePoint Server 2010 concepts in Appendix B.

Figure 2. SharePoint 2010 server topology

SharePoint 2010 also supports other service components. If you plan to design additional services for SharePoint 2010, refer to the Microsoft TechNet website for information on the performance of these features and capacity test results and recommendations.

Solution Overview


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EMC has joined forces with the industry’s leading providers of IT infrastructure to create a complete virtualization solution that accelerates deployment of private cloud. VSPEX enables faster deployment, greater simplicity and choice, higher efficiency, and lower risk. Validation by EMC ensures predictable performance and enables customers to select technology that uses their existing IT infrastructure while eliminating planning, sizing, and configuration burdens. VSPEX provides a virtual infrastructure for customers looking to gain the simplicity that is characteristic of truly converged infrastructures, while at the same time gaining more choice in individual stack components.

VSPEX solutions are proven by EMC and packaged and sold exclusively by EMC channel partners. VSPEX provides channel partners with more opportunity, a faster sales cycle, and end-to-end enablement. By working more closely together, EMC and its channel partners can now deliver infrastructure that accelerates the journey to the cloud for even more customers.


VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, as shown in Figure 3, is a modular, virtualized infrastructure validated by EMC and delivered by EMC partners. VSPEX includes a virtualization layer, server, network, and storage, designed by EMC to deliver reliable and predictable performance.

Figure 3. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure

VSPEX provides the flexibility to choose best-of-breed network, server, and virtualization technologies that fit a customer’s environment to create a complete virtualization solution. VSPEX delivers faster deployment for EMC partner customers, with greater simplicity and efficiency, more choice, and lower risk to a customer’s business.

Reference virtual machine

To simplify the virtual infrastructure discussion, the VSPEX solution has defined a reference virtual machine to represent a measure unit. For more information about a reference virtual machine and its characteristics, refer to the relevant documents in

EMC VSPEX

Solution Overview


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the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure section. By comparing your actual customer usage to this reference workload, you can extrapolate which reference architecture to choose.

For VSPEX solutions, the reference virtual machine is defined as a measure unit of a single virtual machine to qualify the compute resources in the VSPEX virtual infrastructure. This virtual machine has the following characteristics, as shown in Table 3:

Table 3. Reference virtual machine—characteristics

Characteristic Value

Virtual processors per virtual machine 1

RAM per virtual machine 2 GB

Available storage capacity per virtual machine 100 GB

Input/output operations per second (IOPS) per virtual machine

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I/O pattern Random

I/O read:write ratio 2:1

VMware vSphere 5.1 transforms a computer’s physical resources by virtualizing the CPU, RAM, hard disk, and network controller. This transformation creates fully functional virtual machines that run isolated and encapsulated operating systems and applications just like physical computers.

VMware High Availability (HA) provides easy to use, cost-effective high availability for applications running in virtual machines. The VMware vSphere vMotion® and VMware vSphere Storage vMotion® features of vSphere 5.1 enable the seamless migration of virtual machines and stored files from one vSphere server to another, with minimal or no performance impact. Coupled with VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ (DRS) and VMware vSphere Storage DRS™, virtual machines have access to the appropriate resources at any point in time through load balancing of compute and storage resources.

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V provides a complete virtualization platform, which offers increased scalability and performance with a flexible solution from the data center to the cloud. It makes it easier for organizations to realize the cost savings from virtualization and to optimize server hardware investments.

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V high-availability options include incremental backup support, enhancements in clustered environments to support virtual adapters within the virtual machine, and inbox NIC Teaming. In Hyper-V, “shared nothing” live migration enables the migration of a virtual machine from a server running Hyper-V to another one without the need for both of them to be in the same cluster or to share storage.

VMware vSphere 5.1

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V

Solution Overview


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The EMC VNX family is optimized for virtual applications delivering industry-leading innovation and enterprise capabilities for file, block, and object storage in a scalable, easy-to-use solution. This next-generation storage platform combines powerful and flexible hardware with advanced efficiency, management, and protection software to meet the demanding needs of today’s enterprises.

The VNX Series is powered by Intel Xeon processors, for intelligent storage that automatically and efficiently scales in performance, while ensuring data integrity and security.

The VNXe Series is purpose-built for the IT manager in smaller environments. The VNX Series is designed to meet the high-performance, high-scalability requirements of midsize and large enterprises.

Table 4 lists the features that VNX supports.

Table 4. VNX customer benefits

Feature

Next-generation unified storage, optimized for virtualized applications

Capacity optimization features including compression, deduplication, thin provisioning, and application-centric copies

High availability, designed to deliver five 9s availability

Automated tiering with FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools) and FAST™ Cache that can be optimized for the highest system performance and lowest storage cost simultaneously

Simplified management with EMC Unisphere™ for a single management interface for all NAS, SAN, and replication needs

Up to three times improvement in performance with the latest Intel Xeon multicore processor technology, optimized for Flash

Table 5 lists the features that VNXe supports.

Table 5. VNXe customer benefits

Feature

Next-generation unified storage, optimized for virtualized applications

Capacity optimization features including compression, deduplication, thin provisioning, and application-centric copies

High availability, designed to deliver five 9s availability

Multiprotocol support for file and block

Simplified management with Unisphere for a single management interface for all network-attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN), and replication needs

EMC VNX and EMC VNXe

Solution Overview


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VNX software suites available

FAST Suite: Automatically optimizes for the highest system performance and the lowest storage cost simultaneously

Local Protection Suite: Practices safe data protection and repurposing

Remote Protection Suite: Protects data against localized failures, outages, and disasters

Application Protection Suite: Automates application copies and proves compliance

Security and Compliance Suite: Keeps data safe from changes, deletions, and malicious activity

VNXe software suites available

Local Protection Suite: Increases productivity with snapshots of production data

Remote Protection Suite: Protects data against localized failures, outages, and disasters

Application Protection Suite: Automates application copies and proves compliance

Security and Compliance Suite: Keeps data safe from changes, deletions, and malicious activity

Software packs available

Total Efficiency Pack: Includes all five software suites

Total Protection Pack: Includes local, remote, and application protection suites

EMC Avamar solves the challenges associated with traditional backup, enabling fast, reliable backup and recovery for remote offices, data center local area networks (LANs), and VMware environments. Avamar is backup and recovery software that uses patented global data deduplication technology to identify redundant sub-file data segments at the source, reducing daily backup data up to 500 times before it is transferred across the network and stored to disk. This enables companies to perform daily full backups even across congested networks and limited wide area network (WAN) links.

Key Avamar differentiators are:

Deduplication of backup data at the source—before transfer across the network

Enabling of fast, daily full backups across existing networks and infrastructure

Up to 500 times reduction of required daily network bandwidth

Up to 10 times faster backups

Encryption of data in flight and at rest

EMC Avamar

Solution Overview


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Patented redundant array of independent nodes (RAIN) technology that provides fault tolerance across nodes and eliminates single points of failure

Scalable grid architecture

Up to 50 times reduction of total backup storage due to global data deduplication

Daily verification of recoverability

Centralized web-based management

Simple one-step recovery

Flexible deployment options, including the Avamar Data Store package

For more information, see the Avamar documents referenced in the Product section.

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) for VMware vSphere is a plug-in for the vSphere client that provides a single management interface, which is used for managing EMC storage within the vSphere environment. Features can be added and removed from VSI independently, which provides flexibility for customizing VSI user environments. Features are managed by using the VSI Feature Manager. VSI provides a unified user experience, which enables new features to be introduced rapidly in response to changing customer requirements.

We used the following features during validation testing:

Storage Viewer (SV): Extends the vSphere client to facilitate the discovery and identification of the VNX storage devices that are allocated to vSphere hosts and virtual machines. SV presents the underlying storage details to the virtual datacenter administrator, merging the data of several different storage mapping tools into a few seamless vSphere client views.

Unified Storage Management: Simplifies storage administration of the VNX unified storage platform. It enables VMware administrators to provision new network file system (NFS) and virtual machine file system (VMFS) datastores, and raw device mapping (RDM) volumes seamlessly within vSphere client.

For more information, refer to the EMC VSI for VMware vSphere product guides on EMC Online Support.

Hardware acceleration with VMware vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) is a storage enhancement in vSphere 5.1 that enables vSphere to offload specific storage operations to compatible storage hardware such as the VNX Series platforms. With storage hardware assistance, vSphere performs these operations faster and consumes less CPU, memory, and storage fabric bandwidth.

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator for VMware

VNX VMware vStorage API for Array Integration support

Solution Overview


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EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) is an agent-less, no-charge plug-in that enables application-aware storage provisioning for Microsoft Windows server applications, Hyper-V, VMware, and Xen Server environments. It provides the ability for administrators to easily provision block and file storage for Windows or for SharePoint sites using wizards. ESI supports the following capabilities:

Provisioning, formatting, and presenting drives to Windows servers

Provisioning new cluster disks and adding them to the cluster automatically

Provisioning shared CIFS storage and mounting it to Windows servers

Provisioning SharePoint storage, sites, and databases in a single wizard

EMC Storage Integrator

Solution Overview


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Chapter 4 Choosing a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure


Overview ................................................................................................... 32

Step 1: Evaluate the customer use case ...................................................... 32

Step 2: Design the application architectures ............................................... 34

Step 3: Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure ................................. 38

Choosing a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure


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Overview This chapter describes how to design the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint and how to choose the right VSPEX solution to meet your requirements. Table 6 outlines the main steps you need to complete when selecting a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Table 6. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure selection steps

Step Action

1 Evaluate the customer SharePoint workload by using the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint qualification worksheet, based on the business requirement. See the Qualification worksheet in Appendix B.

2 Determine the required infrastructure, SharePoint resources, and architecture using the VSPEX Sizing Tool.

3 Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, based on recommendations provided in Step 3: Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Step 1: Evaluate the customer use case Before you choose any VSPEX solution, it is important to gather and understand the infrastructure requirements, limitations, and the estimated workload in order to design the SharePoint environment properly. To help you to better understand the customer’s business requirements for the VSPEX infrastructure design, EMC strongly recommends that you use the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint qualification worksheet when evaluating the workload requirements for the VSPEX solution.

VSPEX SharePoint qualification worksheet

The VSPEX SharePoint qualification worksheet presents a list of simple questions to help identify customer requirements, usage characteristics, and dataset. For a one-page EMC qualification worksheet for the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint, see the Qualification worksheet in Appendix B. Table 7 provides a detailed explanation of the questionnaire and general guidance on how to determine input values.

Before you start, it is important that you understand the key concepts of SharePoint Server 2010. For more information, see the SharePoint Server 2010 concepts in Appendix B.



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Table 7. VSPEX SharePoint qualification worksheet questionnaire

Question Description

How many SharePoint farms do you plan to host in your VSPEX Proven Infrastructure?

To identify the number of SharePoint farms to plan for in your VSPEX Proven infrastructure. SharePoint enables you to independently create multiple farms for your organization. The VSPEX Proven Infrastructure is designed for up to three SharePoint farms.

Note: If a customer plans to have more than one farm in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, repeat all of the following questions in this worksheet for each SharePoint farm.

Included number of years’ growth?

To define the number of years’ growth that will be calculated in the VSPEX Sizing Tool. Future growth is a key characteristic of the VSPEX solution. This answer helps you to understand the customer’s plan for future growth. EMC suggests planning for at least one year’s growth when using the VSPEX Sizing Tool.

Annual growth rate (%)? Future growth is a key characteristic of the VSPEX solution. You should plan for at least one year’s growth in the amount of data that you initially expect to encounter. Enter a number that is appropriate for your environment.

Is the SharePoint Web application going to be accessed globally?

To define the user base of a SharePoint Server, you need to combine the total number of users and how they are geographically distributed. The answer helps you to understand the peak user base for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution.

Initial farm size (GB)? To define the volume of the content database size that is stored in the SharePoint system. The volume of content is an important element for sizing disk capacity because it can influence the performance of other features, and can also potentially affect network latency and available bandwidth.

If it is your first time to estimate your content database size, refer to the Estimate content database size section.

Number of users? Use this question to estimate the total number of unique users that will access the SharePoint environment. This element is important for defining the resources required in the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution.

User concurrency at peak (%)? Concurrency of users is defined as the total percentage of users actively using the system at peak time. The combination of the number of users and user concurrency defines the user connections to SharePoint at peak time.



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Question Description

What is the main purpose of the SharePoint Web application?

A farm's performance can be affected not only by the number of users interacting with the system, but also by their usage characteristics. In the VSPEX Sizing Tool, it defines the two operations in general use:

Publishing Portal: The website used for social sites and collaboration in the organization.

Document Management Portal: The website used to control the life cycle of documents in the organization.

Select either Publishing Portal or Document Management Portal in the website for your customer’s environment. If your customers are planning to apply SharePoint for other usage characteristics, contact EMC through your Partner Development Manager for information on SharePoint sizing.

Do you use or intend to use the My Sites function?

Because My Site users can edit their profiles, generate activities, upload and download documents, and so on, additional planning of the storage and capacity needs of the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution is required. Enter Yes or No for the customer’s environment.

What is the percentage of the total users who will create My Sites?

Use this question to estimate the additional storage planning for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution.

What is the quota for a single My Site (MB)?

SharePoint Server includes a default Personal Site quota template, which has a storage limit of 100 MB and no user limit. This quota template is used for each user's individual site collection in their My Site. If the default settings for this template do not meet your needs, you can edit it. This factor is important for defining additional storage planning for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution.

Step 2: Design the application architectures

Overview

After you evaluate your customer’s SharePoint real workload and requirements, use the VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint to design your VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution.

Principle and guidelines

In the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure solution, we defined a representative customer reference workload to be sized. The VSPEX Proven Infrastructure reference architectures create a pool of resources that are sufficient to host a target number of reference virtual machines with characteristics, as shown in Table 3. For more information about a reference virtual machine and its characteristics, refer to the relevant documents in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure section.

VSPEX Sizing Tool output: Requirements and recommendations

The VSPEX Sizing Tool enables you to input up to three farm configurations from the customer’s answers in the qualification worksheets. After you complete the inputs into the VSPEX Sizing Tool, the tool generates a series of recommendations, as listed

VSPEX Sizing Tool



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in Table 8. For detailed steps on using the VSPEX Sizing Tool, see the VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint section in Appendix B.

Table 8. VSPEX Sizing Tool output

Type VSPEX Sizing Tool recommendation

Description Reference

Individual farm SharePoint farm configuration

Provides suggestions about farm topology.

For example, medium or small farm.

SharePoint 2010 fundamentals

Individual farm VSPEX configuration suggestion

Sums up the reference virtual machines consumed in this farm.

How to use the VSPEX Sizing Tool

Individual farm Reference virtual machine suggestions for each SharePoint role

Provides detailed information including the number of virtual machines, vCPU, memory, IOPS, and the capacity of the operation system volume in each farm.

Reference virtual machine best practices for SharePoint roles

Individual farm Key metrics and thresholds

Provides key performance metrics that you may need to meet in the validation tests for each farm.

Understanding key metrics

Individual farm Additional storage pool suggestions

Additional storage pools recommendation for SharePoint data including content database, search components, and so on in each farm.

In this VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution, customers may need to add more disks and storage pools to the infrastructure layer to meet different business requirements from performance and capacity considerations for the SharePoint farm.

Storage layout and design considerations

Total Total reference virtual machine

Sums up the reference virtual machines required in the virtual infrastructure for all the SharePoint farms.

This helps you to design and select the right VSPEX solution in the design phase, and combine it with other applications.


Total Additional disks information summary

Summary of the additional disks required for SharePoint data, including the content databases, Services databases, and My Sites content databases of all SharePoint farms.


For more information, see the examples in Step 3: Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.



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Reference virtual machine best practices for SharePoint roles

The VSPEX Sizing Tool provides detailed recommendations for sizing the reference virtual machine from the following basic resource types for each SharePoint role:

vCPU resources best practices

Memory resources best practices

Operating system (OS) capacity resources best practices

OS IOPS best practices

This section describes the resource types, how they are used in the VSPEX Sizing Tool, and key considerations and best practices for a customer environment.

vCPU resources best practices

The calculator provides the vCPU of the reference virtual machine measurement unit consumed for each SharePoint role from the virtual infrastructure. The CPU type must meet or exceed the defined CPU or processor models as defined in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. We validated this VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution with a statically assigned processor, and no virtual-to-physical CPU oversubscription.

In SharePoint Server deployments, EMC recommends that you allocate multiple quad-core web servers that can be easily virtualized and scaled out. The application servers' processor capacity requirements differ, depending on the role of the server and the services it is running. In the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, we used multiple quad-core application servers, mainly for search consideration on the medium SharePoint farm, which proved best during testing. If you are planning additional services on the SharePoint application server, consider reserving more processor resources.

The processor capacity requirements for SQL Server also depend on the service databases that a SQL Server-based computer is hosting. In the small farm, we used a quad-core virtualized SQL Server, which was found to be acceptable. In the medium farm, we used an eight-core virtualized SQL Server that yielded good results during testing.

Memory resources best practices

The VSPEX Sizing Tool shows the recommended memory for the reference virtual machine measurement unit for each SharePoint role. We validated this VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution with statically assigned memory, no over-commitment of memory resources and memory swapping or ballooning. The memory values provided in the tool are not hard limits but represent the value that was tested in the VSPEX solution.

In general, web server memory requirements are highly dependent on the number of application pools enabled in the farm and the number of concurrent requests being served. In most production SharePoint Server deployments, EMC recommends that you allocate at least 8 GB of RAM on each web server and application server. For information about the SQL memory recommendations in this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, refer to the Virtualization design considerations section.



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OS capacity resources best practices

The VSPEX Sizing Tool shows the recommended capacity of the reference virtual machine measurement unit suggested for the operating system for each SharePoint role. EMC recommends that you put the OS volume into the VSPEX virtual infrastructure storage pool in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure solution. For more information about the virtual infrastructure storage pool, see the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure section.

In the medium and small SharePoint farms, EMC recommends that the web servers and application servers allocate at least 100 GB of disk space for the OS and log files.

OS IOPS best practices

The calculator shows the estimated IOPS of the reference virtual machine measurement unit suggested for each SharePoint role in the OS. EMC recommends that you put the OS volume into the VSPEX infrastructure storage pool. In this scenario, we considered more performance characteristics from the application perspective than from the capacity perspective.

The VSPEX Sizing Tool shows suggestions for the number of virtual machines for each SharePoint role. These numbers are calculated by the business requirement, based on the answer in the qualification worksheet.

For more information, refer to the section How to use the in Appendix B and see the examples in the section Step 3: Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Additional considerations and best practices

After you obtain a recommended sizing guide from the VSPEX Sizing Tool, you may need to consider some additional key areas:

Search external data in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 provides support for searching external content, such as public websites, file shares, Exchange public folders, and so on. If customers want to crawl and search through external data, you need to define the additional capacity demand and factor this into the storage layout design. For more information about sizing and designing a VSPEX solution for SharePoint, refer to the Estimate performance and capacity requirements for SharePoint Server 2010 Search article on the Microsoft TechNet website.

Customization

Adding custom code to frequently used pages in the SharePoint environment is a common cause of performance issues. Adding custom code can generate additional round trips to the database servers or web services to service data requests. Customization of infrequently used pages might not significantly impact the throughput, but even well-optimized code can decrease the farm throughput if it is requested thousands of times a day.

If you have custom code in the SharePoint environment, EMC strongly recommends that you contact the vendor to do the capacity design for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution for any additional reference virtual machines required by custom code.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg750251.aspx




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Future growth

It is important to plan for growth so that the environment can continue to deliver an effective business solution. To maintain performance targets and accommodate growth, the VSPEX Sizing Tool enables customers to select from one to three years growth. The cost of over-investment in hardware is usually far less than the cumulative expense of troubleshooting problems caused by undersizing.

Additional services feature for SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 provides a lot of additional features—for example, Access Services, Business Connectivity Services, Excel Services, and InfoPath Forms Services. This VSPEX solution focuses on SharePoint core features like Search Services, User Profile Services, and the My Sites function. If you plan to design the additional services for SharePoint 2010, EMC strongly recommends that you refer to the article Performance and capacity test results and recommendations (SharePoint Server 2010) on the Microsoft TechNet website for different features performance and capacity test results and recommendations.

Note: In the VSPEX Sizing Tool, there are certain limits and boundaries. For more information, see the section Boundaries and supported limits in Appendix B.

Step 3: Choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure

The VSPEX program has produced numerous solutions designed to simplify the deployment of a consolidated virtual infrastructure using vSphere, Hyper-V, the VNX and VNXe family of products, and EMC Next-Generation Backup. Once the application architecture has been confirmed using the VSPEX Sizing Tool, you can choose the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure based on the calculated results.

Note: While this Design Guide is intended for SharePoint Server farm requirements, this may not be the only application intended for deployment on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. You must carefully take into account the requirements for each application you plan to deploy. If you are uncertain about the best VSPEX Proven Infrastructure to deploy, consult EMC before making the decision on the Proven Infrastructure.

Use the following steps, as shown in Table 9, when choosing a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Considerations

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608068.aspx




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Table 9. VSPEX Proven Infrastructure: Selection steps

Step Action

1 Use the VSPEX Sizing Tool to get the total number of reference virtual machines and additional suggested storage layout. For detailed steps, see the How to use the VSPEX Sizing Tool section in Appendix B.

2 Use the VSPEX Sizing Tool to design the other applications’ resource requirements, based on business needs. The VSPEX Sizing Tool calculates the total number of required reference virtual machines and additional recommended storage layouts for both SharePoint and other applications.

3 Discuss the maximum utilization of VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for combined applications to meet business requirements with your customers. Input the maximum utilization percentage of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure in the VSPEX Sizing Tool. The tool provides a recommendation for the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure offering.

4 Select your network vendor and hypervisor software vendor with the recommended VSPEX Proven Infrastructure offering. For more information, visit the EMC VSPEX website.

For more information about the required reference virtual machines, refer to the relevant sizing section in VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

This section describes two examples of two SharePoint 2010 small and medium farms and demonstrates how you would select the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for each one. For more information about selecting a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, see the Qualification worksheet in Appendix B.

Example 1: SharePoint small farm

In this scenario, a customer would like to create a SharePoint 2010 small farm for an intranet-publishing portal on a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. The customer has a locally accessed farm, with about 800 GB of content data spread across three content databases of varying sizes. The expected user count of the farm is 1,000 users, of which 10 percent will be accessing the farm at any peak time. The customer would like to use at most 75 percent of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure utilization for applications

After talking to the customer, complete the following example qualification worksheet for the production SharePoint 2010 farm, as shown in Table 10.

Table 10. Example qualification worksheet: Small SharePoint farm

Question Example answer


1

Included number of years’ growth? 1

SharePoint Farm 1

Annual growth rate (%)? 10

Is the SharePoint Web application going to be accessed globally? No

Examples

http://www.emc.com/platform/virtualizing-information-infrastructure/vspex.htm



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Initial farm size (GB)? 800

Number of users? 1,000

User concurrency at peak (%)? 10

What is the main purpose of the SharePoint Web application? Publishing Portal

Do you use or intend to use the My Sites function? No

What is the percentage of total users who will create My Sites? N/A

What is the quota for a single My Sites (MB)? N/A

After inputting the answers from the qualification worksheet into the VSPEX Sizing Tool, the following reference virtual machine pool is required from your VSPEX Proven Infrastructure in the details, as shown in the example in Table 11. For detailed steps on using the VSPEX Sizing Tool, see the How to use the VSPEX Sizing Tool section in Appendix B.

Table 11. Example of required resources: Small SharePoint farm

SharePoint server role vCPU Memory OS volume capacity

OS volume IOPS

No. of virtual machines

Total reference virtual machines

Web server Equivalent reference virtual machines

4 4 1 1 1 4

SQL Server Equivalent reference virtual machines

4 4 1 1 1 4

Application server

Equivalent reference virtual machines

4 4 1 6 1 4

Total equivalent reference virtual machines 12

The VSPEX Sizing Tool also lists the following recommendations for the storage layout as shown in Table 12. In this case, therefore, implementing this small SharePoint farm on an infrastructure pool would consume the resources of 12 reference virtual machines.

The suggested storage layout is in addition to the VSPEX VNXe Proven Infrastructure pool to store the SharePoint data. For more information, see the Principle and guidelines in the VSPEX Sizing Tool section.



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Table 12. Example of SharePoint farm details in VSPEX Sizing Tool

VSPEX configuration suggestions (total reference virtual machine)

12

Recommended additional storage layout

Pool name RAID type Disk type Disk capacity Disk no.

SharePoint content database pool 4+1 RAID 5 SAS disks rpm 15,000 300 GB 15

SharePoint services pool 3+3 RAID 1/0 SAS disks rpm 15,000 300 GB 12

The VSPEX Sizing Tool lists the key metrics for performance validation, as shown in Table 13. For a detailed explanation of these key metrics, refer to the Understanding key metrics section in the Solution Validation Methodologies chapter.

Table 13. Example of performance key metrics: Small SharePoint farm

Key metrics Thresholds User profile usage

Passed tests per second More than 2

Browse operation Less than 3 seconds 80%

Search operation Less than 3 seconds 10%

Modify operation Less than 3 seconds 10%

Upload operation Less than 3 seconds

Operation states

SQL Server CPU usage less than 50 %

Web server CPU usage less than 70%

Failure rate less than 0.01%

SharePoint is the only application planned for deployment on this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. EMC recommends that customers consider the following two VSPEX infrastructures for the best fit with their requirements:

EMC VSPEX Private Cloud VMware vSphere 5.1 for up to 100 virtual machines Enabled by Microsoft Windows Server 2012, EMC VNXe, and EMC Next-Generation Backup

EMC VSPEX Private Cloud Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V for up to 100 virtual machines Enabled by EMC VNXe and EMC Next-Generation Backup



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Implementing this small SharePoint farm on a pool for 50 reference virtual machines consumes the resources of 12 reference virtual machines and leaves resources for 38 reference virtual machines. Figure 4 shows the resources required for a SharePoint small farm and 38 reference virtual machines, available in the 50 reference virtual machine VSPEX solution stack.

Figure 4. Required resources example: VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for small SharePoint farm

Note: This is not a hard limit; you can select larger VSPEX Proven Infrastructures if requirements from multiple applications make it necessary. In the Implementation Guide, we used Microsoft Hyper-V for 50 virtual machines as a VSPEX solution example. For more information, refer to the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure section.

Example 2: SharePoint medium farm

In this scenario, a customer would like to create a medium SharePoint 2010 farm for the company’s intranet Document Management Portal on a VSPEX Proven Infrastructure. The customer has a locally accessed farm, with about 4 TB of content data spread across four content databases of varying sizes. The expected user count of the farm is 5,000 users. During the business day, 85 percent of users will log onto the portal as the intranet homepage in the morning, which is a peak time. You must define the primary purpose of the SharePoint farm because this is relevant for subsequent CPU and storage resource recommendations. The customer also planned for other applications in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, which are outside the scope of this Design Guide, with a total of 180 reference virtual machines required. In addition, the customer would like to use at most 75 percent utilization of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for combined applications.

After talking to the customer, complete the following VSPEX qualification worksheet for the production SharePoint 2010 farm, as in the example shown in Table 14.



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Table 14. Example VSPEX qualification worksheet: Medium SharePoint farm



1

Included number of years’ growth? 1

SharePoint Farm 1

Annual growth rate (%)? 10

Is the SharePoint Web application going to be accessed globally? No

Initial farm size (GB)? 4,000


User concurrency at peak (%)? 85

What is the main purpose of the SharePoint Web application? Document Management Portal

Do you use or intend to use the My Sites function? No

What is the percentage of total users who will create My Sites? N/A

What is the quota for a single My Site (MB)? N/A

After inputting the answers into the VSPEX Sizing Tool, the following resources are needed from the resource pool, as shown in the example in Table 15.

Table 15. Example of required resources: Medium SharePoint farm

SharePoint server role vCPU Memory OS volume capacity

OS volume IOPS

No. of virtual machines

Total reference virtual machine

Web server Equivalent reference virtual machines

4 4 1 1 4 16

SQL Server Equivalent reference virtual machines

8 16 1 1 1 16

Application server

Equivalent reference virtual machines

4 4 1 1 2 8

Total equivalent reference virtual machines 40

The VSPEX Sizing Tool also lists recommendations for the storage layout, as shown in Table 16. In this case, therefore, implementing this medium SharePoint farm on a virtual infrastructure pool would consume the resources of 40 reference virtual machines.



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The suggested storage layout is in addition to the VSPEX VNX Proven Infrastructure pool to store SharePoint data. For more information, see the Principle and guidelines in the VSPEX Sizing Tool section.

Table 16. Example summary : Medium SharePoint farm in VSPEX Sizing Tool

VSPEX configuration recommendations (total reference virtual machine)

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Recommended additional storage layout

Pool name RAID type Disk type Disk capacity Disk no.

SharePoint content database pool

4+1 RAID 5 SAS disks rpm 15,000 300 GB 30

SharePoint services pool 4+4 RAID 1/0 SAS disks rpm 15,000 300 GB 24

The VSPEX Sizing Tool lists the key metrics for performance validation, as shown in Table 17. For a detailed explanation of these key metrics, refer to the Understanding key metrics section in the Solution Validation Methodologies chapter.

Table 17. Example performance key metrics: Medium SharePoint farm

Key metrics Thresholds User profile usage

Passed tests per second More than 71

Browse operation Less than 3 seconds 50%

Search operation Less than 3 seconds 20%

Modify operation Less than 3 seconds 20%

Upload operation Less than 3 seconds 10%

Operation states

SQL Server CPU usage less than 50%

Web server CPU usage less than 70%

Failure rate less than 0.01%

As SharePoint is not the only application that the customer needs to design in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, EMC recommends using the VSPEX Sizing Tool to design the combined applications workload that has the best fit with the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure offering.

Because the total combined applications required 180 reference virtual machines and 75 percent utilization of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, EMC recommends that customers consider the following two VSPEX infrastructures for the best fit with their requirements:

EMC VSPEX Private Cloud VMware vSphere 5.1 for up to 100 virtual machines Enabled by Microsoft Windows Server 2012, EMC VNXe, and EMC Next-Generation Backup

EMC VSPEX Private Cloud Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V for up to 100 virtual machines Enabled by EMC VNXe and EMC Next-Generation Backup



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Implementing this medium SharePoint farm on a pool for 250 reference virtual machines consumes the resources of 40 reference virtual machines and leaves resources for 210 reference virtual machines for other applications. Figure 5 shows the required resources for a SharePoint medium farm and 40 reference virtual machines, available in the 250 reference virtual machine VSPEX solution stack.

Figure 5. Required resources example: VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for medium SharePoint farm

In the Implementation Guide, we used VMware vSphere 250 virtual machines as a VSPEX solution example. For more information, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint.



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Chapter 5 Solution Design Considerations and Best Practices


Overview ................................................................................................... 48

Network design considerations .................................................................. 48

Storage layout and design considerations .................................................. 50

Virtualization design considerations .......................................................... 60

Application design considerations ............................................................. 61

Backup and recovery considerations .......................................................... 64

Solution Design Considerations and Best Practices


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Overview This chapter provides best practices and considerations for the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint solution. We considered the following aspects during the solution design:

Network design

Storage layout design

Virtualization design

Application design

Backup and recovery design

Network design considerations

Networking in the virtual world follows the same concepts as in the physical world, but some of these concepts are applied in the software instead of using physical cables and switches. Although many of the best practices that apply in the physical world continue to apply in the virtual world, there are additional considerations for traffic segmentation, availability and throughput.

Figure 6 and Figure 7 show the high availability design of the network layer in the VNXe or VNX series. The advanced networking features of the VNX family provide protection against network connection failures at the array. Each hypervisor host has multiple connections to user and storage Ethernet networks to guard against link failures. These connections should be spread across multiple Ethernet switches to guard against component failure in the network. For more information, see the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure section.

Figure 6. Network layer: High availability (VNXe)

Overview of network design considerations



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Figure 7. Network layer: High availability (VNX)

In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint, EMC recommends that you consider the following aspects for network design:

Separate different network traffic

Keep the virtual machine, storage, and vSphere vMotion or Microsoft Windows Hyper-V Live Migration network traffic separate using VLAN segmentation.

Network redundancy

A goal of redundant topologies is to eliminate network downtime caused by a single point of failure. All networks need redundancy for enhanced reliability. Network reliability is achieved through reliable equipment and network designs that are tolerant to failures and faults. Networks should be designed to reconverge rapidly so that the fault is bypassed. In this solution, we have two network switches and all three networks have their own redundant link.

Use network interface card (NIC) teaming

Aggregate multiple network connections in parallel to increase throughput beyond what a single connection can sustain, and to provide redundancy in case one of the links fails. For example, in the VMware virtualization environment, use two physical NICs per vSwitch and uplink the physical NICs to separate physical switches.

When setting the NIC teaming settings, it is considered best practice to select “no” for the NIC teaming failback option. If there is some intermittent behavior in the network, this will prevent flip-flopping of the NIC cards being used.

When setting up VMware high availability (VMware HA), it is a good starting point to also set the following ESX Server timeouts and settings under the ESX Server advanced setting tab:

Design best practices



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NFS.HeartbeatFrequency = 12

NFS.HeartbeatTimeout = 5

NFS.HeartbeatMaxFailures = 10

Use hardware load balancing or Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB)

NLB is particularly useful for ensuring that stateless applications, such as a web server running IIS, are scalable by adding additional servers as the load increases. Load-balancing servers (also called hosts) in a cluster communicate among themselves to provide key benefits, including:

Scalability: NLB scales the performance of a server-based program, such as a web server, by distributing its client requests across multiple servers within the cluster. As traffic increases, additional servers can be added to the cluster, with up to 32 servers possible in any one cluster.

High availability: NLB provides high availability by automatically detecting the failure of a server and repartitioning client traffic among the remaining servers within ten seconds, while providing users with continuous service.

SharePoint supports hardware load balancing that provides various layers of security filtering, caching, compression, and other advanced features that Windows NLB does not have.

For more information on creating a Windows NLB cluster, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint section.

For other best practices in network design for the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, refer to the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure guide.

Storage layout and design considerations

The best practice and design considerations in this section provide guidelines for effectively planning storage for various business requirements in SharePoint Server 2010 environments.

Figure 8 shows the high-level architecture between the SharePoint components and storage elements validated in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint on a vSphere virtualization platform. All the SharePoint volumes are stored in virtual machine data file (VMDK) format on NFS for small to medium business.

Overview



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Figure 8. SharePoint storage elements on VMware vSphere 5.1 platform

In addition to the infrastructure pool for virtual machines, EMC recommends that you use the three additional storage pools to store SharePoint data for different purposes. For more information, see Table 18.



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Table 18. SharePoint related storage pools name and the purpose

Pool name Purpose RAID recommendation

Virtual machine infrastructure pool

The infrastructure pool where all the virtual machines reside. For details, refer to the appropriate VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

RAID 5 with SAS disks

SharePoint content databases pool

The pool where all content database data and their logs reside.

RAID 5 with SAS disks

SharePoint Services pool

The pool for SharePoint query and crawl components and all the service databases.

RAID 1/0 with SAS disks

SharePoint My Sites content databases pool

The pool for SharePoint My Sites content database data and log files.

RAID 6 with NL-SAS disks

Figure 9 shows the high-level architecture between the SharePoint components and storage elements validated in the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for SharePoint on a Microsoft Window Server 2012 Hyper-V virtualization platform.



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Figure 9. SharePoint storage elements on Hyper-V platform

All the SharePoint volumes are stored in the new Hyper-V virtual hard disk format (VHDX) on the cluster-shared volume (CSV). For more information on additional storage pools to store SharePoint data, see Table 18.



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In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint, consider the following best practices for storage layout and design:

SharePoint content databases pool:

Use RAID 5 for the SharePoint content database storage pool where the SharePoint content databases reside. This is because RAID 5 provides high capacity utilization, along with good I/O performance, at a low cost. This applies to both VNXe and VNX Series.

Use SAS disks for both performance and capacity consideration. In the VSPEX Sizing Tool, the disk number of each pool is calculated to meet both capacity and IOPS requirements.

Reserve a buffer for the content database capacity volume. All SharePoint content resides in the content database, which means it can grow at a certain rate. Consider this factor when planning the capacity for your content databases. In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, we reserved an additional 30 percent buffer for the content database capacity volumes.

SharePoint services pool:

Use RAID 1/0 for the SharePoint services storage pool. This pool consists of all the SharePoint services components, configuration databases, and tempdb, except the content database. The composition of this pool depends on which feature or service you want to enable in SharePoint, according to your business requirements.

One of the most demanding components is the SharePoint Server Search function, which has a very important role in this pool. When the SharePoint Server Search function is started and the corresponding Search Service Application has been created, three search databases are generated. For more information about the basic concepts of search components, refer to SharePoint Server 2010 concepts in Appendix B.

In addition, you can configure multiple query and crawl components for both the index and query functions. The databases and components generate high IOPS when combined together. EMC recommends that you use RAID 1/0 for search service-related database and components. This also applies to other databases that are associated with other SharePoint services.

Use SAS disks for both performance and capacity consideration. In our VSPEX Sizing Tool, the disk number of each pool is calculated to meet both capacity and IOPS requirements.

Put the SQL Server tempdb database on a RAID 1/0 array for best performance because tempdb is write-intensive into the SharePoint services pool. For more information about best practices for the tempdb database, see the Design section of SQL Server 2012 for SharePoint Server 2010.




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SharePoint My Site content database pool (if applicable):

Use RAID 6 with near-line SAS (NL-SAS) for the SharePoint My Site pool. The SharePoint My Site pool, which is not illustrated in the storage layout diagram, consists of a content database, which is only used for My Site.

Considering that My Site has relatively low client access and the main design factor is the capacity, EMC recommends that you set this pool to RAID 6 with NL-SAS for high capacity consideration.

Estimate the SharePoint search volume capacity:

The VSPEX Sizing Tool calculates the recommended disk requirements for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution. You may also need to calculate the total capacity of the volume for the SharePoint search components. Some guidelines for volume capacity planning are as follows:

a. Understand your customer’s estimate of the total content database size with yearly growth for crawl needs. You can easily get this number from the qualification worksheet. If this is your first time designing the SharePoint farm for a customer, refer to Appendix B to estimate the content database size. The value is referred to as ContentDBSize in the formula.

b. Calculate the total index size of the query components using the following formula:

TotalIndexSize= ContentDBSize * 0.035

c. Determine the number of index partitions you will have, based on your scenario. Divide the TotalIndexSize by the number of index partitions.

d. Multiply each query component by 3 to calculate the disk volume capacity for a single query component to allow room for index merging.

For example, in the medium SharePoint farm, you will have four index partitions. Use the following formula to calculate each query components size:

QueryComponentIndexSize = TotalIndexSize / 4 * 3

e. Calculate the volume size of the property database. Use the following formula to estimate each property database volume capacity. EMC recommends that you use one property database if your crawl items are less than 50 million items.

PropertyDBSize = ContentDBSize * 0.015 / PropertyDBNumber

PropertyDBLogSize = ContentDBSize * 0.031 / PropertyDBNumber

f. Calculate the volume size of the crawl database. Use the following formula to estimate the volume capacity of each crawl database. EMC recommends that you use one crawl database if your crawl items are less than 25 million items.

CrawlDBSize = ContentDBSize * 0.046 / CrawlDBNumber

CrawlDBLogSize = ContentDBSize * 0.011 / CrawlDBNumber



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For detailed steps on how to scale out search components, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint section.

Use 64 KB of the file allocation unit size (cluster size) for the SharePoint volumes:

Cluster size is determined when the partition is formatted by the OS or user. For the best performance, EMC recommends using 64 KB for SQL databases. For more information, refer to the topic Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server in the MSDN Library.

Customization consideration:

If customers have custom code for SharePoint farm, EMC recommends that customers work together with vendors to estimate the additional capacity and IOPS requirement for the storage layout.

VNX for file:

When creating LUNs for VNX for file, consider the following best practices:

a. Create approximately one LUN for every four drivers in the storage pool.

b. Create the LUNs in even multiples of 10.

Numbers of LUNs = (number of drivers in pool divided by 4), rounded up to nearest multiple of 10.

c. Make all the LUNs the same size.

d. Balance LUN ownership across SPA and SPB.

For more information, refer to EMC VNX Unified Best Practices for Performance.

Additional performance requirements for FAST Suite:

As an extensible and customizable collaboration platform, usage patterns and workloads on SharePoint Server 2010 can vary greatly. While this guide caters and designs for typical deployments, as described by Microsoft and experienced by EMC, additional storage performance requirements may be demanded by certain highly active SharePoint environments.

In such SharePoint environments, extreme performance demands are put on the storage to meet or exceed customer-driven response time service-level agreements (SLAs) and to continue to provide the best user experience.

As SharePoint has a significant number of active storage elements (such as databases, search indexes, and so on), it can be difficult to manually analyze and provision storage designs, and to continue to meet those ever-changing requirements.

The EMC FAST Suite— FAST VP and FAST Cache—provides two key technologies, available on the VNX Series, that enable extreme performance in an automated fashion, when and where needed. FAST technology is an available option in VSPEX Proven Infrastructures. For more information on FAST Suite for VSPEX Proven Infrastructures, see the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure section.

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The Services pool contains SharePoint search and tempdb storage elements (databases and indexes). It can experience significant I/O workloads due to systematic processes running as part of the maintenance of the SharePoint farm—for example, recrawling or defragmentation of the SQL Server database indexes during scheduled database maintenance (timer jobs). It is widely reported that some customers disable search indexing (recrawling) during peak hours due to the disruptive, intense burden that crawling imposes on storage.

Enabling FAST Cache or FAST VP is a transparent operation to SharePoint and no reconfiguration or downtime is necessary. To make the best use of either of the FAST technologies, first enable FAST Cache on the SharePoint Services storage pool.

If FAST VP is the enabled technology on the VNX system, you can use this instead of FAST Cache, by adding additional Flash disks as an extreme performance tier into the SharePoint Services pool. For best use of the Flash tier, set all file LUNs to auto-tier. This can be verified in the Advanced Data Services section for the storage pool properties in Unisphere.

Refer to the best practices in the white paper EMC FAST VP for Unified Storage Systems.

If FAST technology is enabled on the SharePoint Services pool, the search response times, crawl throughput, and tempdb latencies will improve to aid the SharePoint user experience.

This section describes two example storage layouts in this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint—one of a farm for VNXe, based on VSPEX private cloud, and the other of a farm for VNX, based on VSPEX private cloud. Both of these examples follow the best practice and design considerations as previously discussed.

Figure 10 shows an example of the storage layout in the SharePoint farm for the VNXe Series.

Storage layout examples

http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h8058-fast-vp-unified-storage-wp.pdf

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Figure 10. Storage layout example: SharePoint farm for the VNXe Series



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Figure 11 shows an example of the storage layout in the SharePoint farm for the VNX Series.

Figure 11. Storage layout example: SharePoint farm for VNX Series

Note: These are only two examples of a storage layout. To plan and design your own storage layouts for SharePoint over a VSPEX stack, follow the guidance in the VSPEX Sizing Tool and the best practices in Storage layout and design considerations.



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Virtualization design considerations

SharePoint Server 2010 is fully supported when you deploy it in a virtual environment that is supported by Hyper-V technology or VMware vSphere ESXi™ technology. The following sections describe the best practices and design considerations for SharePoint Server 2010 virtualization.

In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint, EMC recommends that you consider the following best practices for virtualization design.

Virtualize the web servers and application servers: Operating in a virtual environment gives you the flexibility to reallocate resources across virtual machines as necessary to tune performance. You can also add and remove virtual servers more easily to address spikes in the usage of specific services that occur at predictable times throughout the year.

Virtualize SQL Server: The database role is responsible for storing, maintaining, and returning data to the other roles in the farm. This role has the highest amount of disk I/O activity and can often have very high memory and processor requirements. There is high value in being able to simply migrate the SQL Server application to higher-powered servers or provide greater resourcing through virtualization.

Set the proper amount of memory for the SQL Server virtual machine: The memory required for SharePoint Server 2010 is directly related to the size of the content databases that you are hosting on the server that is running SQL Server. Table 19 demonstrates the RAM recommended for computers running SQL Server, based on the combined size of the content databases.

Table 19. Recommended RAM for SQL Server

Combined size of content databases RAM recommended for computers running SQL Server

Recommendation for up to 1 TB 8 GB

Recommendation for a range of 1 TB to 5 TB 32 GB

Maximize the overall throughput by mixing the farm server roles on each host. For example, you can reduce disk contention by mixing web servers with application servers because they usually do not write to disk at the same time.

Spread the same SharePoint server role across different hosts. For example, you may have several web servers in a medium SharePoint farm. In this scenario, for a redundancy consideration, EMC recommends that you spread these web servers across different hosts.

Enable the VMware HA, DRS, and vMotion function.

If you select vSphere as your hypervisor, enable the VMware HA, DRS, and the vMotion function on the ESXi servers to provide basic availability and scalability. As before, EMC recommends that you spread the SharePoint roles across different ESXi hosts.

Overview




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The VMware DRS function can automatically balance the workload between the hosts by using the vMotion function. When SharePoint workloads increase, DRS automatically moves a bottlenecked virtual machine to another host with more available resources, without downtime.

After you enable the DRS function, consider using DRS affinity and anti-affinity rules. EMC recommends that you use DRS affinity and anti-affinity rules for specific groups of virtual machines (for example, a group of web servers) that should never reside on the same host. DRS also enables the grouping of virtual machines by a common name and restricting their execution to a specific subset of hosts. For detailed steps on how to configure DRS, refer to Implementation Guides for SharePoint.

Monitor the performance of your whole VSPEX Proven infrastructure regularly. Monitoring performance not only happens at the virtual machine level, but also at the hypervisor level. For example, when the hypervisor is ESXi, you can use performance monitoring inside the SharePoint virtual machine to ensure virtual machine or SharePoint performance. Meanwhile, at the hypervisor level, you can use esxtop to monitor host performance. For detailed information on the performance monitoring tool, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint section.

Application design considerations

Design considerations for SharePoint Server 2010 involve many aspects. The best practice and design considerations in this section provide guidelines for the most common and important ones to follow.

SQL Server 2012 for SharePoint Server 2010

In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized SharePoint, EMC recommends that you consider the following best practices for the SharePoint 2010 farm design:

Do not enable the AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS option on a SQL Server instance that is supporting SharePoint Server. SharePoint Server configures the required settings upon provisioning and upgrade. Using AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS can significantly change the execution plan of a query from one instance of SQL Server to another instance. Therefore, to provide consistent support for all customers, SharePoint Server provides coded hints for queries, as needed, to provide the best performance across all scenarios.

Set the maximum degree of parallelism (MAXDOP) option to 1 for SQL Server instances hosting SharePoint Server 2010 databases, to ensure that each request is served by a single SQL Server process. For detailed steps, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint.

For best performance, place the tempdb system database on a RAID 1/0-capable array. In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, EMC suggests using a minimum of two tempdb datafiles for the small SharePoint farm and minimum of four datafiles for the medium SharePoint farm.

Overview of application design considerations




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Set the database autogrowth values as a percentage instead of a fixed number of megabytes. The bigger the database, the bigger the growth increment should be. Consider, for example, that we used 10 percent autogrowth for the SharePoint databases. For detailed steps, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint.

Use the full recovery model for the SharePoint content database and the simple recovery model for the SharePoint services database:

The full recovery model enables administrators to back up the transaction logs incrementally. It enables recovery of the SharePoint content database from a specific point in time from log backup, even if the data files of the content databases are corrupt. EMC recommends that you take log backups regularly for the full recovery model.

The simple recovery model automatically reclaims log space to keep the space requirement small, essentially eliminating the need to manage the transaction log space. However, simple recovery cannot easily support log backups.

For detailed configuration steps, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint section.

SharePoint Server 2010 Publishing Portal

In this VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, EMC suggests that you use caching to the Publishing Portal for better performance in the SharePoint farm. Caching can provide big benefits in a publishing site. Be sure to use the appropriate caching type. When used correctly, caching can significantly improve the throughput and user response time. You can configure the following cache types:

Output cache: Stores the requested page content in the memory of the web server.

Object cache: Stores SharePoint objects, such as web and list item metadata, in the memory of the web server.

Binary large object (BLOB) cache: Stores image, sound, video, and other large binary files on disk. Always cache .js, .css, and any other file types that are related to the branding of your site.

For more information, refer to the article Configure cache settings for a Web application on the Microsoft TechNet website. For detailed steps on creating a SharePoint 2010 Publishing Portal, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint section.

SharePoint Server 2010 Document Management Portal

If you have a huge number of items such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, or PowerPoint presentations stored in the SharePoint Document Library, EMC recommends that you create very large document libraries by either nesting folders or using standard views and site hierarchy.

SharePoint Server 2010 supports high-capacity document storage. A document library can contain millions of documents. However, depending on how the content is used, the performance of sites that contain many documents can decrease. If you are

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770229.aspx




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planning a large-scale content management solution, refer to the Enterprise content storage planning (SharePoint Server 2010) article on the Microsoft TechNet website.

For detailed steps on creating a SharePoint 2010 Document Management Portal, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint section.

SharePoint Server 2010 Search Service

Before you design your SharePoint search topology in the farm, it is important for you to understand the search concepts described in SharePoint Server 2010 concepts in Appendix B before you start.

The SharePoint Server 2010 Search Service contains a richer set of features and a more flexible topology model than earlier versions. Consider the following best practices before you implement your search topology:

Defragment the search database periodically. The search database contains metadata and access control lists (ACLs) of crawled content. Over a series of crawls, the search database can become fragmented. To improve the performance of crawls and queries, periodically defragment the search database.

Scale out the query and crawl components to multiple partitions for load balancing. EMC recommends placing the query components load on different servers to distribute the load.

Create additional property databases in the search service application if your crawl items are over 50 million items.

Create additional crawl databases in the search service application if your crawl items are over 25 million items.

Create a mirror of another index partition for each query component and distribute them to different servers for fault tolerance consideration.

To optimize your crawl performance, consider creating more crawl components or adding more application servers for crawl.

Redirect all crawl traffic to the application server in the SharePoint farm. This prevents the crawler from using the same resources that are being used to render and serve web pages and content to active users.

By default, the SharePoint Server 2010 crawler crawls all available web servers in a SharePoint farm through the network load balancer in that farm. Therefore, when a crawl is occurring, the crawler can cause increased network traffic, increased usage of the storage and processor resources on the web servers, and increased usage of the resources on the database servers. Putting this additional load on all web servers at the same time can decrease performance across the SharePoint farm.

For detailed steps on search topology configuration, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint section.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/9994b57f-fef8-44e7-9bf9-ca620ce20734(v=office.14)#plan_ent_typlarge




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Backup and recovery considerations

The EMC Avamar plug-in supports the backup and recovery of SharePoint, ranging from the entire SharePoint farm to various object levels, such as content databases or items. Additional flexibility includes the ability to change the installation type from the web server to the back-end and conversely. You should back up the other components in the SharePoint environment with the Avamar Client for Windows. This will enable recovery for not only the web servers and content databases, but also for the related SharePoint servers.

If vSphere is being protected by Avamar virtual machine image protection, users can restore the virtual machines without needing an Avamar Client installed on the hosts. Those hosts need to be restored from federated SharePoint backups if they are web servers or content databases.

The Avamar plug-in for SharePoint Volume Shadow (Copy) Service (VSS) relies on the base Avamar Client for Windows and enables the web servers and content databases to realize federated backups. For disaster-level recovery, virtual machine image recovery enables the OS-level recovery. SharePoint-level recovery is applied after those resources are restored. The implementation of vSphere image-level protection is beyond the scope of this guide but is a viable option for restoring base operating systems.

Only the Avamar SharePoint VSS or Microsoft Office SharePoint Sever (MOSS) plug-in can enable federation between the web servers and content database servers. It is critical that those components are federated as they rely on data to be consistent with each other. A single web server has the Avamar SharePoint VSS plug-in installed and set to “front-end installation”. This manages the federated backup task. Even if other web servers exist, only one of them is set to the front-end installation type. Figure 12 shows a visual representation of an installation map.

Note: Using Data Domain as the backup target for Avamar is also an option. The Avamar Client and plug-ins are installed in the same way as when using Avamar as the backup target. If you use Data Domain, the only difference between methods is a checkbox in the dataset definition. This is called out in context within these implementation steps.

Considerations



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Figure 12. Installation map

Table 20 lists the minimum hardware requirements.

Table 20. Hardware requirements for backup

Requirement Minimum

Memory (RAM) 2 GB

File system NTFS

Note: You must convert FAT 16 and 32 systems to NTFS

Network 10BASE-T at a minimum; 100BASE-T or higher is recommended, configured with the latest drivers for the platform

Minimum backup software and hardware requirements



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Avamar plug-in for SharePoint granular-level recovery: Software requirements

The Avamar plug-in for SharePoint granular-level recovery (GLR) places additional demands on computer hardware and resources, beyond the base requirements for the Avamar plug-in for SharePoint VSS. The following topics describe the various requirements for the Avamar plug-in for SharePoint GLR.

Memory The Avamar plug-in for SharePoint GLR may require additional memory (RAM). The amount of additional or total memory required depends on the current system performance with the existing memory:

If resources are already strained and performance is slow with regular operations of the Avamar plug-in for SharePoint VSS, then add significantly more memory to support SharePoint GLR operations.

If performance is currently adequate with regular operations of the Avamar plug-in for SharePoint VSS, then additional memory may not be required to support SharePoint GLR operations.

Third-party recovery tools may require additional memory. Consult the vendor documentation for the tool for specific memory requirements.

The minimum hardware requirements in Table 20 are for reference, as a minimum for the plug-in to operate. In the context of this guide, the environment will surpass these requirements.

Database size SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) supports content databases of up to 4 TB in size, and the Avamar software supports databases up to the maximums allowed by SharePoint. However, the maximum database sizes recommended by Microsoft for rapid backup and recovery are 200 GB for SharePoint 2010 on the Microsoft TechNet website.

Third-party recovery tool A third-party recovery tool, such as Kroll Ontrack, is required to browse and restore individual items from the data restored to the Administrator Console with the Avamar plug-in for SharePoint VSS.

The Kroll Ontrack package is not included in the Avamar plug-in for SharePoint VSS installation and must be purchased separately.

Kroll Ontrack PowerControls is available for resale through the EMC Select program. You can order it within the EMC ordering system. The Avamar ordering flow on Direct Express and Channel Express provides the option of selecting PowerControls. For details on the software, go to the EMC online support website and select Home > Products > EMC Select > Kroll Ontrack to view the Kroll Ontrack landing page.

The EMC Avamar Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix, also available on the EMC online support website, provides the most up-to-date and accurate listing of supported third-party recovery tools.



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Mapped network drive

For SharePoint GLR you need to create an Avamar virtual drive, which appears as a local drive in folder windows, such as Windows Explorer. If another user or user session has mapped a network drive within a user session on a client machine, the Avamar software cannot detect those drive mappings when assigning a drive letter for the Avamar virtual drive. If you select a drive letter that is already mapped during SharePoint GLR, then the folder view of the drives shows the mapped network drive. The drive letter assignment for the Avamar virtual drive is not visible.

To prevent this from occurring, use a drive letter that you know is not in use when you specify the drive letter for the Avamar virtual drive during the recovery. If the “Z” drive is already mapped to a network drive, do not use the default value of slash (/) because that causes the Avamar virtual drive to map to the Z:\ drive.

If you notice drive-mapping issues after you create the Avamar virtual drive, then disconnect the conflicting network mapping in GLR sessions where it does not appear. The Avamar virtual drive then appears.

Multistreaming Avamar configuration requirements

When you specify multistreaming options for a backup, specify a maximum of one backup stream for each disk in the backup set. For example:

If you back up two databases with each database on its own disk, you can specify a maximum of two streams.

If you back up two databases with each database and its logs on two disks (for a total of four disks), you can specify a maximum of four streams.

Database requirements

SharePoint documentation provides a list of SQL Server versions that SharePoint supports. The Avamar plug-in for SharePoint VSS supports all SQL Server versions that SharePoint supports.

Notes

Full farm recovery and disaster recovery requires a full backup provided by the Avamar plug-in for SharePoint VSS. You cannot use a backup from the Avamar plug-in for SQL Server. See the section “Avamar plug-in for SQL Server” in the EMC Avamar 6.1 for SharePoint VSS User Guide for more information about the advantages and disadvantages of using the Avamar plug-in for SQL Server for SharePoint database backups.

If you plan to use the Avamar plug-in for SQL Server to back up SharePoint databases, then review the EMC Avamar Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix, available on the EMC online support website, for a list of SQL Server versions that the SQL Server plug-in supports. It is important to understand that using the Avamar plug-in for SQL Server does not protect the SharePoint instance at a farm level.

You can use the Avamar plug-in for SQL Server to back up all databases in the environment except for the search database. The Avamar plug-in for SQL Server backup does not include the search index file, which must be



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synchronized with the search database backup so that they can both be restored together.

In addition, the Avamar plug-in for SharePoint VSS only performs full backups of SharePoint SQL content databases.

A full backup does not manage SQL Server log file truncation. To work around this limitation, set the SQL Server databases to Simple Recovery Model so that log truncation is not necessary.

Required account privileges

You must run the Avamar plug-in for SharePoint VSS agent service and the SharePoint administrator with the same domain account.

In addition, to perform a federated farm restore, which is a full farm restore of a distributed farm, you must have domain-level administrator access. Typically, the administrator account you used when installing and configuring the SharePoint farm is a member of the Administrators group on each server, and can be used as a valid account for the federated restore. If you use a different administrator account, other than the one you used to install SharePoint, you must do both of the following:

1. Add the SharePoint Administrator account to the Domain Administrators group.

2. Assign the Log on as a service right to the SharePoint Administrator account on each server that runs any of the SharePoint services. This setting is specified in Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Assignment > Log on as a service.

Avamar Backup Agent service runs as LocalSystem

The Avamar Backup Agent service must be running as LocalSystem on all machines.

Services and writers

Table 21 lists the services and writers required for Avamar SharePoint VSS plug-in operations. If in a federated environment, each of these may be on a different machine. This list may be useful for troubleshooting backup or recovery failures.

Table 21. Services and writers used by Avamar plug-in for SharePoint VSS

Microsoft application Service or writer name

SharePoint 2010

SharePoint2010Administration(SPAdminV4)

SharePoint2010Timer(SPTimerV4)

SharePointFoundationSearchV4(SPSearch4)

SharePointServerSearch14(OSearch14)

SharePoint2010VSSWriter(SPWriterV4)

SQL Server SQLServer(MSSQLSERVER)

SQLServerVSSWriter(SQLWriter)


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Chapter 6 Solution Validation Methodologies


Baseline hardware validation methodology ................................................ 70

Application validation methodology ........................................................... 70

Backup and recovery validation methodology ............................................. 75

Test tools .................................................................................................. 76

Solution Validation Methodologies


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Baseline hardware validation methodology Hardware consists of the computer's physical resources such as processors, memory, and storage. Hardware also includes physical network components such as network interface cards (NICs), cables, switches, routers, and hardware load balancers. You can avoid many performance and capacity issues by using the correct hardware for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution. Conversely, a single misapplication of a hardware resource, such as insufficient memory on a server, can affect performance across the entire farm.

For detailed steps on verifying the redundancy of the solution components, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint section.

Application validation methodology After you validate the hardware and redundancy of the solution components, the next stage is SharePoint application testing and optimization, which is also a critical step of the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution. Test the new VSPEX Proven Infrastructure before deploying it to production to ensure the architectures you designed achieve the required performance and capacity targets. This enables you to identify and optimize potential bottlenecks before they impact users in a live deployment.

Before you start validating your SharePoint performance on the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, make sure you have deployed SharePoint 2010 in your VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, based on the Implementation Guides for SharePoint. You can only test and validate SharePoint after it has been implemented.

Table 22 describes the high-level steps to complete before you put the SharePoint environment into production.

Table 22. High-level steps for application validation

Step Description Reference

1 Define the test scenario (as noted in the VSPEX Sizing Tool) to demonstrate your realworld business workload.

Defining the test scenarios

2 Understand the key metrics for your SharePoint environment to achieve performance and capacity that meet your business requirements.


3 Use the VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint to determine the architecture and resources of your VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

EMC VSPEX website

4 Design and build the SharePoint solution on VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

Implementation Guides for SharePoint

5 Create the test environment using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS).

Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server website

http://www.emc.com/platform/virtualizing-information-infrastructure/vspex.htm

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Step Description Reference

6 Populate or copy data from an old production environment to demonstrate a realworld environment.

Test tools for database population

7 Run the tests, analyze the results, and optimize your VSPEX architecture.

Test tools for database population

Before running a SharePoint test, it is important that you define the test scenarios according to the business requirements. You can easily work out your own test scenarios and test plans in the VSPEX Sizing Tool.

The key factors we considered in the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint test scenario are:

Operations: Define the different operations that end users perform in the SharePoint website. Understanding these key operations helps you to demonstrate a real environment test. Table 23 lists some of the general operations we considered in the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution.

Table 23. General operations

Operation Description

Browse Browse the SharePoint page, including the home page.

Access a document library list view page.

Modify Download a random document in SharePoint (for example, .doc, .docx, .ppt, .xls).

Edit and update the properties of document.

Search Search for keywords in the SharePoint search portal.

Document upload Upload a document to SharePoint.

Workload: Define the key operational characteristics of the farm, including the user base, concurrency, the features being used, and the user agents or client applications that are used to connect with the farm. Understanding your expected demand and usage characteristics enables you to validate your environment more accurately, and reduce the risk of constantly running the system in the production environment.Table 24 lists some of mixed workloads considered in the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution.

Defining the test scenarios



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Table 24. Mixed workload

Mixed workload Scenario % in the mix

Publishing Portal:

The operation mainly focuses on page browse.

Browse 80%

Modify 10%

Search 10%

Document Management Portal:

Document activities are typically 30%.

Browse 50%

Modify 20%

Search 20%

Document upload 10%

Operational states: The load of a production system has two major operational states—the Green Zone state, in which the system is operating under the normal, expected load range, and the Red Zone state, in which the farm experiences very high, transient resource demand that can only be sustained for limited periods. In the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution, we listed the Green Zone and Red Zone with the following criteria:

Green Zone:

All the operations were completed in less than 3 seconds.

All SharePoint servers have a CPU utilization of less than 70 percent; all the SQL servers have a CPU utilization of less than 50 percent.

Failure rate is less than 0.01 percent.

Red Zone:

All the operations were completed in less than 3 seconds.

All SharePoint servers have a CPU utilization of less than 90 percent; all the SQL Server instances have a CPU utilization of less than 70 percent.

Failure rate is less than 0.1 percent.

Note: During a search crawl, it is acceptable for the CPU utilization and disk response time to exceed the stated SLAs for a temporary period of time.

In addition to the test scenario, it is important to know the goal of the SharePoint testing to make it easier to decide which metrics to capture and what thresholds must be met for each metric when running the SharePoint validation tests. To validate the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution, we considered the following key metrics:

Requests per second (RPS): This is also known as Passed Tests per Second in the VSTS test. RPS is the number of operations received by a farm or server in one second. Most tests are based on RPS, which can tell you how many requests the SharePoint farm can service in a given period of time. RPS can be




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used for measuring how many pages or documents are delivered, uploaded, or modified, as well as how many queries are executed.

This is a common measurement of the server and farm load. For more information about how RPS is calculated, refer to the RPS calculation methodology section in Appendix B.

Operation duration: The length of time it takes to complete a user request (SharePoint operation). Different organizations define different goals, based on their business requirements and user expectations. Some organizations can afford a latency of several seconds, whereas other organizations require very fast transactions. In the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution, the default response time for each common SharePoint user operation is to be completed within 3 seconds or less.

Note: Microsoft publishes SLA response times for each SharePoint user operation. Common operations (such as browse and search) should be completed within 3 seconds or less, and uncommon operations (such as modify) should be completed within 5 seconds or less. These response-time SLAs were comfortably met or exceeded.

The VSPEX Sizing Tool helps you to understand your basic metrics and thresholds to meet your customer’s business requirement. For more information about using the VSPEX Sizing Tool, refer to VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint in Appendix B.

When you have decided the test objectives, defined the measurements, and determined what the capacity requirements are for your farm, the next objective is to design and create the test environment for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution. The test farm should duplicate the production environment as closely as possible. All the features previously described should be considered, for example: storage layout, network load balance, networking, and so on.

In the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution, we used VSTS in conjunction with code to simulate a realworld SharePoint user activity. For more information about the sample performance test code, refer to the Sample code for SharePoint performance testing section. When you set up your test environment, you need to create a plan for the servers in the SharePoint Server 2010 farm, and also for the machines needed to execute the tests. Generally, more of the machines are used as load test agents. The agents are the machines that take instructions from the test controller about what to test, and issue requests to the SharePoint Server 2010 farm. The test results themselves are stored on a SQL Server-based computer. For more information about VSTS, see the Visual Studio Team System topic at the MSDN Library.

As well as the test environment and test tool, you may also need to use some other tools to prepare the whole test environment for SharePoint. For more information on tools, see the Backup and recovery validation methodology section. Also, refer to the Microsoft TechNet website for more information about building the test environment for the SharePoint environment.

Creating the test environment


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After the test environment is created, you may need to decide what type of data you are going to run. If you do not have any production environment data, refer to the Backup and recovery validation methodology section for the general data population tool to demonstrate a customer environment. EMC recommends that you use data from an existing production farm and restore it to the VSPEX SharePoint environment. If you run tests against made-up or sample data that is different from your real content, you run the risk of skewed test results.

After the database is populated and test environment is created, run the tests based on the designed test scenario using VSTS. With Visual Studio Team Test Load Agent, you can configure the browser mix, network mix, load patterns, and run settings for different workloads in the web tests.

We followed these general best practices in the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution:

Do not use the think time feature. Think time is a VSTS feature that enables you to simulate the time that users pause between clicks on a page. For example, a typical user might load a page, spend three minutes reading it, and then click a link on the page to visit another site. Trying to model this in a test environment is nearly impossible to do correctly, so it does not add value to the test results. Modeling is difficult because most organizations do not have the ability to monitor different users and the time they spend between clicks on different types of SharePoint sites (such as publishing or search or collaboration). Furthermore, using the think time does not add value because even though users may pause between page requests, the SharePoint Server 2010-based servers do not.

Use a goal-based load pattern in the VSTS test for the Green Zone test. A goal-based usage test is when you establish a threshold for a certain diagnostic counter, like CPU utilization, and test attempts to drive the load to keep that counter between the minimum and maximum threshold that you defined. If you want to understand your general throughput for the VSPEX SharePoint environment in a normal situation, use goal-based load pattern tests to establish a threshold for the CPU utilization of the SharePoint Server. For more information about different patterns, see the Running Load and Web Performance Tests topic at the MSDN Library.

Once the test is complete, you can use the Visual Studio Analyzer to check the results and verify that you have achieved the key metrics in your test environment. If the test results are not ideal, it is easy to identify the bottleneck using different tools. For detailed information about tools, refer to the corresponding guide in the Implementation Guides for SharePoint section.

After identifying potential bottlenecks, refer to the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure documentation to make sure that you have the correct configuration of VNXe/VNX, switches, hypervisor, or load balancer for the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution. System bottlenecks represent a point of contention where there are insufficient resources to service user transaction requests. Consider adding more resources into the solution to

Populating the database

Running tests, analyzing results, and optimization

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meet the requirement. Often, the reason for the bottleneck will be inefficient custom code or third-party solutions due to customization.

For detailed configuration information, refer to the Implementation Guides for SharePoint section.

Backup and recovery validation methodology

The topology of SharePoint can vary depending on the specific requirements of the implementation. As a summarized review of data protection, initial implementation points, and recovery options, refer to this list:

Install the Avamar Client for Windows on all SharePoint hosts, including those that are not web servers or content servers. This provides restore abilities for all farm servers in the event that other components need to be restored. Use of Avamar VMware vSphere image protection is also a consideration in the protection and recovery plans for base OS/virtual machine recovery.

Install the Avamar SharePoint VSS plug-in installation with one front-end configuration installation and the rest as the back end, even if there are multiple web servers. The front-end Avamar SharePoint VSS plug-in acts as the master to ensure the federated VSS snapshot take place throughout the farm in relation to web and content servers.

The first SharePoint VSS backup should not use multiple streams. The base Level 0 backups are very I/O intense. Single stream use alleviates resource utilization. This only applies to the very first back up. To use a single stream for the first backup, edit the existing SharePoint dataset you have created and set streams to 1.

The granular recovery feature is possible with the Kroll Ontrack PowerControls software. Avamar’s restore tasks enable the GLR option that mounts the virtual device for Kroll to use for granular recovery needs. This alleviates the need to restore the entire database in order to recover a subset of content.

When you install Avamar SQL Server plug-ins on the back-end servers, this enables you to recover other databases into the farm. It also enables a SharePoint Administrator to add new content to the farm. The SQL Server plug-in is not intended to be used for the existing farm content, because the plug-in needs to be federated with the indexes in the farm. The SharePoint VSS plug-in enables that requirement. However, a SQL Server backup of the content databases does enable that content to be restored out of place, or into another SQL Server instance, for migration purposes. Those tasks are then finished by a SharePoint Administrator and are added to the new SharePoint farm.

The Avamar plug-in for SharePoint VSS only performs full backups of the SharePoint SQL content databases. A full backup does not manage SQLServer log file truncation. To work around this limitation, set the SQL Server databases to Simple Recovery Model so that log truncation is not necessary.

For specific expectations about performance or deduplication results, EMC offers a BRS assessment to analyze actual content based on actual data. Because the Avamar

Validating the backup and recovery plan



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and Data Domain implementation and sizing is a global task, which includes many backup requirements, it is outside the scope of this document. The BRS assessment activity, whether onsite with installed tools or with provided information from a site, is from where the design specifications are driven.

Test tools In this VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution, we used a Bulk Loader tool to create unique documents. This command-line tool tool, written using the Microsoft .NET 4.0 Framework, can create unique documents based on a Wikipedia dump file. This utility enables you to create up to 10 million unique Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and HTML files of various sizes so you can load different content types of different sizes directly into the SharePoint 2010 Document Libraries. This tool uses a dump file of Wikipedia content as input to allow the creation of up to 10 million unique documents to a disk location.

For more information on the bulk loader tool, see the Bulk Loader - Create Unique Documents based on Wikipedia Dump File topic at the MSDN Library.

In this VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution, we used a LoadBulk2SP tool to load documents into the SharePoint Server. The tool was written using C# and the Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework to be compatible with SharePoint Server. This tool takes the Bulk Loader tool disk output files as input for loading directly into the SharePoint Server, mimicking the same folder and file structure, and using targeted web applications and document libraries specified in the application configuration.

For more information on the LoadBulk2SP tool, see the Load Bulk Content to SharePoint 2010 topic at the MSDN Library.

This sample Visual Studio 2010 solution assists by providing load and stress testing for search, document download, and view pages scenarios. Refer to the sample code and customize in your own VSPEX solution to validate the SharePoint 2010 performance.

For more information, see the SharePoint Performance Testing topic at the MSDN library.

Sample tool to create large number of random documents

Sample tool to load documents into SharePoint

Sample code for SharePoint performance testing

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Bulk-Loader-Create-Unique-eeb2d084


http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Load-Bulk-Content-to-3f379974


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Appendix A References

This appendix presents the following topics:

White papers ............................................................................................. 78

Product documentation ............................................................................. 78

Other documentation ................................................................................. 78

Links ......................................................................................................... 79

References


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White papers For additional information, see the white papers listed below.

EMC Unisphere Remote: Next-Generation Storage Monitoring - A Detailed Review

EMC FAST VP for Unified Storage Systems

Product documentation The following documents, available from EMC Online Support, provide additional and relevant information. If you do not have access to a document, contact your EMC representative.

EMC VNXe Series Using a VNXe System with Microsoft Windows Hyper-V

EMC VNXe Series Using a VNXe System with NFS Shared Folders

EMC VNX Unified Best Practices for Performance - Applied Best Practices Guide

EMC VNXe Series Configuration Worksheet

EMC VNX Series Configuration Worksheet

VNXe3100/3150: How to Monitor System Health

EMC VSI for VMware vSphere: Storage Viewer - Product Guide

EMC VSI for VMware vSphere: Unified Storage Management - Product Guide

EMC VNX Host Connectivity Guide for VMWare ESX Server

VNX Operating Environment for File Release Notes Version

EMC Avamar 6.1 for SharePoint VSS User Guide

EMC Avamar 6.1 Administration Guide.pdf

EMC Avamar 6.1 for Hyper-V User Guide.pdf

EMC Avamar 6.1 for VMware User Guide.pdf

EMC Avamar Compatibility and Interoperability Matrix

Other documentation For information on Microsoft SharePoint, see the documents listed below:

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 on VMware Best Practices Guide

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 on VMware Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 on VMware Availability and Recovery Options



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For documentation on Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft SharePoint, refer to the Microsoft website at http://www.microsoft.com.

For documentation on SharePoint 2010 on VMware, refer to the VMware website at http://www.vmware.com.

Links Microsoft TechNet

Refer to the following articles on the Microsoft TechNet website:

Estimate performance and capacity requirements for SharePoint Server 2010 Search

Performance and capacity test results and recommendations (SharePoint Server 2010)

Configure cache settings for a Web application

Enterprise content storage planning (SharePoint Server 2010)

MSDN Library

Refer to the following topics in the MSDN Library:

Visual Studio Team System

Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server

Bulk Loader - Create Unique Documents based on Wikipedia Dump File

Load Bulk Content to SharePoint 2010

SharePoint Performance Testing

Running Load and Web Performance Tests

Note: The links provided were working correctly at the time of publication.

http://www.microsoft.com/

http://www.vmware.com/











http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SharePoint-Testing-c621ae38


References


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Appendix B Qualification Worksheet and VSPEX Sizing Tool

This appendix presents the following topics:

Qualification worksheet ............................................................................. 82

SharePoint Server 2010 concepts ............................................................... 84

VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint ................................................................ 87

Qualification Worksheet and VSPEX Sizing Tool


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Qualification worksheet Before you start sizing the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint solution, gather information about the customer’s business requirements by using the qualification worksheet. Table 25 provides a qualification worksheet for a SharePoint farm.

Table 25. Qualification worksheet for a SharePoint farm

Question Answer



SharePoint Farm 1

Annual growth rate (%)?

Is the SharePoint Web application going to be accessed globally? Yes or No

Initial farm size (GB)?

Number of users?

User concurrency at peak (%)?

What is the main purpose of the SharePoint Web application? Publishing Portal or Document Management Portal

Do you use or intend to use the My Sites function? Yes or No

What is the percentage of total users who will create My Sites?


SharePoint Farm 2




Number of users?






SharePoint Farm 3





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Question Answer


Number of users?






A standalone copy of the VSPEX for virtualized SharePoint qualification worksheet is attached to this PDF. Click the paper clip icon in the left-hand pane of Adobe Reader to reveal the attachment. Double-click the file to open the qualification worksheet and print it from your browser.

How to print the worksheet for customer use



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SharePoint Server 2010 concepts

Review the key SharePoint 2010 concepts listed in Table 26. It is important that you fully understand these key concepts.

Table 26. SharePoint 2010 fundamental concepts

Concept Description

Server farm The top-level element of a logical architecture design for SharePoint Server.

Web application An IIS website that is created and used by SharePoint Server 2010.

Content database Provides storage web application content. You can also have multiple content databases in a web application.

Read/write characteristics depend on the user profile: the Publishing Portal is read-intensive; the Document Management Portal could be write-intensive.

Site collection A set of websites that have the same owner and share administration settings.

Site One or more related web pages and other items (such as lists, libraries, and documents) that are hosted inside a site collection.

Service applications A service application provides a resource that can be shared across sites within a farm or, in some cases, across multiple farms.

My Sites My Sites are special SharePoint site collections that contain profile information about a user, links to content created by a user and stored in SharePoint databases, and information about the people, interests, and activities a user is tracking.

Publishing Portal A starter site collection that can be used for an Internet site or a large intranet portal. The site includes a home page, sample press releases site, search center, and log-in page. Typically, this site has many more readers than contributors, and it uses approval workflows to publish the web pages.

Document Management Portal

A site collection in which you can centrally manage and collaborate on documents in your organization.

Figure 13 shows the basic content structure in a SharePoint 2010 farm. In the SharePoint farm, you can create multiple web applications to host IIS websites with different URLs. For each web application, you can have multiple content databases. You can create different site collections in one content database, including the Publishing Portal or Document Management Portal. Each site collection can have multiple sites with different lists and document libraries to store list items and different types of documents.

SharePoint 2010 fundamentals



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Figure 13. SharePoint 2010 content structure

Table 27 lists the key concepts of the SharePoint search service. It is important to understand these concepts before designing the SharePoint search function.

Table 27. SharePoint search service concepts

Concept Description

Search service application

A search service application provides the search function to end users to search across the sites in the farm, or even across multiple farms.

Crawling Collects content to be processed.

Indexing Organizes the processed content into a structured or searchable index.

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Concept Description

Query processing Retrieves a relevant result set relative to a given user query.

Search administration database

The search administration database hosts the search service application configuration and access control list (ACL), and Best Bets for the crawl component. This database is accessed for every user and administrative action.

Search crawl database

Search crawl database stores the state of the crawled data and the crawl history. You have multiple crawl databases in a large farm. The database will be heavy write during the crawl. Refer to Design best practices in the Application design considerations section.

Search property database

Search property database stores information that is associated with the crawled data, including properties, history, and crawl queues. You have multiple property databases in a large farm. The database will be heavy write during the crawl. Refer to Design best practices in the Application design considerations section.

Search crawl components

Crawl components process crawls of data, propagate the resulting index files to query components, and add information about the location and crawl schedule of content sources to their associated crawl databases. Crawl components are associated with a single search service application. Each crawl database can have multiple crawl components. Refer to Design best practices in the Application design considerations section.

Search query components

Query components return search results to the query originator. Each query component is part of an index partition, which is associated with a specific property database that contains metadata associated with a specific set of crawled content. Each query database can have multiple query components. Refer to Design best practices in the Application design considerations section.

User Profile service application

The User Profile service application stores information about users in a central location and enable users to search people information across the sites.

Profile database Profile database is used to store user profile information. Each of these databases can be accessed by My Sites, Team Sites, and other SharePoint sites by using the User Profile service application. This provides a dynamic, personalized experience for the users in an organization.

Synchronization database

Synchronization database is used to store configuration and staging information for synchronizing profile data from external sources such as the Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS).

Social tagging database

Social tagging database is used to store social tags and notes created by users. Each social tag and note is associated with a profile ID.



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VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint

The VSPEX Sizing Tool is an online tool for users to size the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure and select the right VSPEX offering.

Note: Before you use the VSPEX Sizing Tool, prepare the answers in the Qualification worksheet.

To use the VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint, follow these steps:

1. Log into the EMC VSPEX Sizing Tool on the EMC Business Value Portal and click Create Analysis to create a new VSPEX Sizing analysis..

If you have existing analysis records, you can click the name to edit or delete the record, as shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14. EMC VSPEX Sizing Tool: All Analyses

2. Enter the name of the analysis report and required information, then click Begin to start a new VSPEX sizing, as shown in Figure 15.

Figure 15. EMC VSPEX Sizing Tool: Create Analysis page

3. Under the Inputs tab, in Application Data–SharePoint , input the answers from the qualification worksheet into the VSPEX Sizing Tool. The tool enables you to size up to three SharePoint farms in your VSPEX Proven Infrastructure.

After completing all the questions, the tool refreshes the page automatically and shows the recommendation of disks requirement summary of three farms in addition to virtual infrastructure pool.

If the answers are outside of the support boundaries, the VSPEX Sizing Tool displays an error message. For assistance, contact EMC through your Partner


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Development Manager. For more information, see the Boundaries and supported limits section.

The VSPEX Sizing Tool also shows the total reference virtual machine (RVM) requirements for SharePoint, which can help you to select the right VSPEX Proven Infrastructure offering, as shown in Figure 16.

Figure 16. SharePoint farm sizing: Sample page

4. Click Details to check the detailed information for each farm, as shown in Figure 17.

Figure 17. EMC VSPEX Sizing Tool: SharePoint questionnaire

In the Details summary, the VSPEX Sizing Tool shows information and recommendations for each of the individual SharePoint Farm Configuration, Total Reference Virtual Machines, additional storage layout, Server Summary, and the Key Metrics for each farm, as shown in Figure 18. You can adjust these values based on the specific requirements.



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Figure 18. Details information: Example page for SharePoint farm

5. If the customer is planning to include other applications in the VSPEX Sizing, use the VSPEX Sizing Tool for sizing the other applications.

6. In the VSPEX Data tab, input the percentage for the Maximum Utilization of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure offering that customer would like to set for multiple applications, as shown in Figure 19.

The VSPEX Sizing Tool automatically displays the recommended VSPEX Proven Infrastructure offering, the Resources Needed for the combined applications, the quantity of Resources Available and percentage of Utilization for the recommended VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, as shown in Figure 19.



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Figure 19. VSPEX Data page: Example of detailed information

7. After you have selected the correct VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, click the View Results button at the bottom of the page to download all the information as Microsoft Office documents.

The VSPEX Sizing Tool has certain limits and boundaries. If the customer’s business requirement exceeds these limits and boundaries, contact EMC through your Partner Development Manager for further assistance with SharePoint farm sizing and planning.

It is important to know and understand these boundaries to ensure that you do not make incorrect assumptions when you design the VSPEX solution for SharePoint. In the VSPEX Sizing Tool, thresholds and supported limits are established through testing, business needs, and the observation of farm behavior under increasing loads. Table 28 lists the limitation and boundaries in the VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint.

Boundaries and supported limits



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Table 28. Limitation and boundaries in the VSPEX Sizing Tool for SharePoint

Limit Maximum value

Notes

Initial farm size (GB) 5,000 This is not a hard limit but a validated maximum value in EMC VSPEX solution. If the customer is planning more than 5 TB data, contact EMC through your Partner Development Manager.

Requests per second

(Document Management Portal)

66 This is not a hard limit but a validated maximum value in the VSPEX solution. You can exceed this value to accommodate specific requirements. If the RPS value exceeds the threshold, contact EMC through your Partner Development Manager.

For detailed information about calculating the RPS value, refer to RPS calculation methodology.

Requests per second

(Publishing Portal)

93 This is not a hard limit but a validated maximum value in the EMC VSPEX solution. You can exceed this value to accommodate specific requirements. If the RPS value exceeds the threshold, contact EMC through your Partner Development Manager.

For detail information about calculating the RPS value, refer to RPS calculation methodology.

In the VSPEX Sizing Tool, one of the key metrics is RPS. Most tests are based on RPS, which can tell you how many requests the SharePoint farm can service in a given period of time. RPS can be used for measuring how many pages or documents are delivered, uploaded, or modified, as well as how many queries are executed.

RPS is calculated automatically after customers complete the qualification worksheet in the VSPEX Sizing Tool. The formula is:

Total RPS = Active Users*User Concurrency at Peak*Heavy User Load

“Active Users” means the average number of active users at any point in time. In cases where the distribution of the users is worldwide, we assume that only half of the total number of users is active due to the time-zone gap.

SharePoint site users can be classified into four groups:

Light users generate 20 requests per hour or 2 user operations per hour (user ops/hour)

Typical users generate 36 requests per hour or 3.6 user ops/hour

Heavy users generate 60 requests per hour or 6 user ops/hour

Extreme users generate 120 requests per hour or 12 user ops/hour

RPS calculation methodology



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In this VSPEX Sizing Tool, we used a heavy users profile as an assumption, which is suitable for most user scenarios.

For example, if you get the following answers from a customer:

Question Answer

Is the SharePoint Web application going to be accessed globally? Yes


User concurrency at peak (%)? 20%

Then, the total RPS is:

Total RPS = 10,000 * 0.5 *20% * 60/3600 = 17

If it is your first time using a SharePoint farm, you might need to estimate your content database storage size. The questionnaire in Table 29 describes how to estimate the content database size.

Table 29. Formula to estimate content database size

Question Answer

Number of documents?

Refer to D in the formula.

For the Document Management Portal and Publishing Portal, you can calculate the number of documents that are managed and generated by a process.

If you are migrating from a current system, it may be easier to extrapolate your current growth rate and usage. If you are creating a new system, review your existing file shares or other repositories and estimate based on that usage rate.

Average size of documents?

Refer to S in the formula.

It may be worthwhile to estimate averages for different types or groups of sites. The average file size for document management or publishing portals can vary significantly.

List Items?

Refer to L in the formula.

List items are more difficult to estimate than documents. We generally use an estimate of three times the number of documents (D), but this will vary based on how you expect to use your sites.

Number of noncurrent versions?

Refer to V in the formula.

Estimate the average number of versions any document in a library will have (this value will usually be much lower than the maximum allowed number of versions).

After you complete the questionnaire, use the following formula to estimate the size of your content databases:

Database size = ((D × V) × S) + (10 KB × (L + (V × D)))

Estimate content database size



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For example, if you get the following answers from a customer:

Question Answer

Number of documents (D) 200,000

Average size of documents (S) 500 KB

List Items (L) 50,000

Number of non-current versions (V) 2

Then, the database size is:

Database size = (((200,000 x 2)) × 500) + ((10 KB × (50,000 +

(200,000x 2))) = 204,500,000 KB or 195 GB

VSPEX qualification worksheet

Question Answer



SharePoint Farm 1




Number of users?






SharePoint Farm 2




Number of users?






SharePoint Farm 3




Question Answer

Number of users?






EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for Virtualized SharePoint · Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with...

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