TECHNICAL REPORT

DEPLOYING MICROSOFT OFFICE SHAREPOINT SERVER 2007 USING PS SERIES ISCSI SAN ABSTRACT This Technical Report describes how to deploy Microsoft® Office Sharepoint® Server (MOSS) in an iSCSI SAN using PS Series storage arrays. It provides configuration and management recommendations and best practices for a MOSS 2007 Small Farm on the PS Series SAN.

TR1051 V1.0

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Possession, use, or copying of the documentation or the software described in this publication is authorized only under the license agreement specified herein.

Dell, Inc. will not be held liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. The information in this document is subject to change.

[October 2009]

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PREFACE Thank you for your interest in Dell EqualLogic™ PS Series storage products. We hope you will find the PS Series products intuitive and simple to configure and manage.

PS Series arrays optimize resources by automating volume and network load balancing. Additionally, PS Series arrays offer all-inclusive array management software, host software, and free firmware updates. The following value-add features and products integrate with PS Series arrays and are available at no additional cost:

• PS Series Array Software

o Firmware – Installed on each array, this software allows you to manage your storage environment and provides capabilities such as volume snapshots, clones, and replicas to ensure data hosted on the arrays can be protected in the event of an error or disaster.

Group Manager GUI: Provides a graphical user interface for managing your array

Group Manager CLI: Provides a command line interface for managing your array.

o Manual Transfer Utility (MTU): Runs on Windows® and Linux host systems and enables secure transfer of large amounts of data to a replication partner site when configuring disaster tolerance. You use portable media to eliminate network congestion, minimize downtime, and quick-start replication.

• Host Software for Windows® o Host Integration Tools

Remote Setup Wizard (RSW): Initializes new PS Series arrays, configures host connections to PS Series SANs, and configures and manages multipathing.

Multipath I/O Device Specific Module (MPIO DSM): Includes a connection awareness-module that understands PS Series network load balancing and facilitates host connections to PS Series volumes.

VSS and VDS Provider Services: Allows 3rd party backup software vendors to perform off-host backups.

Auto-Snapshot Manager/Microsoft® Edition (ASM/ME): Provides point-in-time SAN protection of critical application data using PS Series snapshots, clones, and replicas of supported applications such as SQL Server, Exchange Server, Hyper-V, and NTFS file shares.

o SAN HeadQuarters (SANHQ): Provides centralized monitoring, historical performance trending, and event reporting for multiple PS Series groups.

• Host Software for VMware

o Storage Adapter for Site Recovery Manager (SRM): Allows SRM to understand and recognize PS Series replication for full SRM integration.

o Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition (ASM/VE): Integrates with VMware Virtual Center and PS Series snapshots to allow administrators to enable Smart Copy protection of Virtual Center folders, datastores, and virtual machines.

Current Customers Please Note: You may not be running the latest versions of the tools and software listed above. If you are under valid warranty or support agreements for your PS Series array, you are entitled to obtain the latest updates and new releases as they become available.

To learn more about any of these products, contact your local sales representative or visit the Dell EqualLogic™ site at http://www.equallogic.com. To set up a Dell EqualLogic support account to download the latest available PS Series firmware and software kits visit: https://www.equallogic.com/secure/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fsupport%2fDefault.aspx

TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface ...........................................................................................................................ii Office Sharepoint® Server 2007 using PS Series storage arrays........................................1 Benefits of Deploying Sharepoint® with PS Series Storage ..............................................2 Planning and Design Considerations ................................................................................3 Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability ......................................................................4 Performance ...................................................................................................................4 Scalability.......................................................................................................................4 Recoverability.................................................................................................................4 Ease of Management .......................................................................................................4 Service Level Commitments............................................................................................4 MOSS 2007 with a PS Series SAN ..................................................................................5 Background Information .................................................................................................5 Basic Tasks:....................................................................................................................5 Choosing a MOSS 2007 Installation ................................................................................8 Deploying Sharepoint® in a Hyper-V virtual environment ...............................................9 Maintaining a Sharepoint® Farm ................................................................................... 20 Monitor sites and content and perform clean-ups regularly ............................................. 20 SQL Server Data Management ...................................................................................... 21 Expanding SAN Storage Online .................................................................................... 21 Backing up Sharepoint® ............................................................................................... 21 For More Information.................................................................................................... 23 Technical Support and Customer Service ....................................................................... 24

Revision Information

The following table describes the release history of this Technical Report.

Report Date Document Revision

1.0 October 2009 Initial Release

The following table shows the software and firmware used for the preparation of this Technical Report.

Vendor Model Software Revision

Microsoft®® Windows®® Server 2008 x64 All Editions

Microsoft®® Sharepoint®® Server 2007 All Editions Service Pack 1

Microsoft®® SQL Server -® 2008 All Editions

Dell™ Host Integration Tools for Microsoft®® Windows®

Version 3.2 and later.

Dell™ PS Series Array Firmware Version 4.0.5 and later.

The following table lists the documents referred to in this Technical Report. All PS Series Technical Reports are available on the Customer Support site at: support.dell.com

Vendor Document Title

Microsoft®® Performance and capacity requirements for deploying Microsoft® Office Sharepoint® Server 2007 in a Hyper-V™ virtual environment.

Microsoft®® Getting started with Office Sharepoint® Server 2007

Microsoft®® Install Office Sharepoint® Server 2007 in a server farm environment

Microsoft®® Site and Solution Planning Microsoft® Windows® Sharepoint® 2007

Dell™ Deploying Microsoft® Hyper-V with PS Series Arrays

Dell™ Deploying Windows® Server 2008 with PS Series SANs

Microsoft®® Microsoft®’s Server Virtualization Validation Program

VMware® Running Microsoft® Office Sharepoint® Server 2007 on VMware Infrastructure

OFFICE SHAREPOINT® SERVER 2007 USING PS SERIES STORAGE ARRAYS

Microsoft®® Office Sharepoint®® Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) is a server application for the enterprise that facilitates collaboration, provides full content management features, implements business processes, and provides access to information essential to your organizational goals and processes. It provides an integrated platform to plan, deploy, and manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise. Office Sharepoint® Server 2007 document management features provides support for everything from template creation to document authoring, reviewing, sharing and auditing. Because Office Sharepoint® Server 2007 is built on and includes the full features of Windows®® Sharepoint® Services 3.0, it is an ideal tool for collaboration. Windows® Sharepoint® Services 3.0 provides a consistent, familiar framework for lists and document libraries, site administration, and site customization. As the use of Web Parts, lists, libraries, and workflows expands many Sharepoint® installations face ever-growing demands for increased storage space, higher performance, and increased recoverability. To handle these demands, many corporations deploy complicated solutions such as Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS), and traditional (non-virtualized) Storage Area Networks (SANs).

With any SAN, you can consolidate storage resources and provide a more scalable configuration than DAS or NAS, while also improving performance and simplifying management. In addition, a SAN can deliver high-end functionality like snapshots and data replication that not only improve data protection and recovery capabilities, but also enhance Sharepoint® operations. However, much SAN technology consists of expensive and complex offerings that are difficult to implement and manage.

To provide storage consolidation for any enterprise, Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS Series storage arrays enable you to set up an IP-based (iSCSI) SAN that delivers performance, scalability, recoverability, and resilience beyond that delivered by other SANs. To work with a PS Series SAN, all a server needs is a standard iSCSI initiator. Once connected to a PS Series SAN over an IP network, volumes on the SAN appear as regular disks, which can be formatted and managed as usualit’s that simple.

Integrated storage virtualization software makes a PS Series SAN easy to manage, providing automatic RAID configuration, disk sparing, data provisioning, replication, and load balancing. For reliability, PS Series storage arrays include redundant, hot-swappable hardware, including disks, control modules, fans, and power supplies. Increasing volume size, like most PS Series SAN management tasks, is a point-and-click operation.

To expand SAN capacity, you can group together multiple arraysstorage and performance scale linearly. With multiple arrays in the SAN you gain the ability to create a tiered storage solution along with pools, in effect SANs within the SAN. Storage has never been this easy to use.

By deploying Sharepoint® Server with a PS Series SAN, businesses can combine the industry-leading content management and collaboration application with reliable, scalable, and high-performance disk storage to meet the ever-expanding needs of Sharepoint® users.

To get the maximum benefits from Sharepoint® and PS Series storage, you should adhere to the best practices for Sharepoint® Server, as outlined by Microsoft® and industry experts. In addition, this Technical Report contains requirements and recommendations for deploying Sharepoint® Server with PS Series storage, including best practices for performance, reliability, scalability, flexibility, and recoverability. The best practices described in this report are applicable to all versions of Microsoft® Sharepoint®. The examples in this Technical Report were created using

Microsoft® Sharepoint® Server 2007 running on Microsoft® Windows® Server 2008 64-bit. Key issues addressed by this report are:

• Design considerations, including availability, performance, scalability, and management.

• How to set up a PS Series group and volumes.

• How to set up a Sharepoint® Server Farm, including optimizing the server farm in a virtualized environment.

• Configuring Sharepoint® to use PS Series volumes.

• Expanding SAN capacity and file systems without affecting availability.

• Backing up Sharepoint® data.

BENEFITS OF DEPLOYING SHAREPOINT® WITH PS SERIES STORAGE The benefits of deploying Sharepoint® server with a PS Series SAN include but are not limited to:

• Rapid deployment and configuration of storage – A PS Series SAN can be up and running quickly, providing storage for Sharepoint®. A simple setup utility lets you quickly configure an array on the network and create a PS Series group. Automation of complex operations such as RAID configuration, disk sparing, data provisioning, and load balancing means that even users new to SAN technologies can effectively manage the SAN.

• Redundant hardware and hot serviceable configuration – PS Series storage arrays are fully redundant with dual controllers, power supplies, and fansall of which can be serviced online and without disrupting applications. The Auto-Stat Disk Monitoring System (ADMS) automatically scans drives in the background to ensure optimal data availability.

• Data protection. All data is protected with RAID and spare disks. Combined with “hot” service capabilities, online operation is assured. Volume snapshot, clone, and replication protection capabilities are available and included at no extra cost.

• Simple and immediate storage expansion – Using modular PS Series storage arrays as the Sharepoint® Server storage solution, you can increase SAN storage capacity and performance online, without server or application disruption.

• Network path protection and load balancing – Using multiple NICs or iSCSI HBAs with the Microsoft® iSCSI Initiator service, you can configure multipath I/O and increase the reliability and performance of Sharepoint® Server. Also known as MPIO, multipath I/O enables the dynamic load balancing of iSCSI SAN traffic across redundant paths between the Sharepoint® Server and the PS Series SAN.

• Advanced Management features. PS Series storage comes standard with a comprehensive set of features including:

o Automatic load balancing

o Virtual volume management

o Thin Provisioning

o Space-efficient snapshots for instant backup and restore

o Volume cloning for rapid server provisioning

o Multipath I/O (MPIO) support

o Cluster support

o Auto-replication for a comprehensive disaster recovery solution

o Storage pools creating a “SAN within a SAN”

o Member-by-member RAID level control

o Collections (consistency groups) tying volumes together across arrays and pools

• VSS-based backups – The EqualLogic Host Integration Tools kit includes a VSS provider, called Auto-Snapshot Manager for Windows®, that interacts with the PS Series storage, the Windows® Server 2008 VSS writer, and a VSS requestor backup application to dramatically improve backup operations by creating flexible, space-efficient, point-in-time-copies of data called snapshots or Smart Copies.

• Thin provisioning database and Log volumes – With PS Series thin provisioning capability, administrators have the option to pre-allocate storage resources. This type of storage allocation eliminates the pains of expanding available storage when the application requires it. Repeated data growth operations can be avoided and the result is improved utilization of physical storage resources.

• Remote site volume replication – With the PS Series auto-replication capability, Sharepoint® Server data can be automatically transferred to remote data centers, protecting the data from serious failures, ranging from the destruction of the volume to a complete site disasterwith no impact on data availability or performance.

PLANNING AND DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS When designing a Sharepoint® Server environment, you should understand these challenges:

• Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability

• Performance

• Scalability

• Recoverability

• Ease of management

• Service level commitments

It is critical to focus on these challenges before you begin the initial Sharepoint® installation. The Technical Report, Deploying Windows® Server 2008 with PS Series SANs (http://www.equallogic.com/resourcecenter/assetview.aspx?id=7631 ) and Site and Solution Planning Microsoft® Windows® Sharepoint® 2007, (http://technet.Microsoft®.com/en-us/library/cc789336.aspx) describes how to design a Sharepoint® server and network environment.

Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability The environment must be robust, resilient, and easily repaired by hot swapping components while the system remains available. In a SAN configuration, the server, network, and storage arrays should all have a robust level of fault tolerance to avoid costly downtime and allow scheduled maintenance to take place without service disruption. Special attention should be placed on fault isolation and overall operations while system components are being serviced.

You can easily build fault tolerance into your Sharepoint® Server storage environment by using PS Series storage arrays, which provide high availability and scalability, in addition to hot-swappable hardware and MPIO support.

Performance The Sharepoint® environment must provide optimal performance and response time. Access to Sharepoint® data is crucial to the day-to-day operations of most companies, and under-performing storage can have a devastating effect on the overall performance of Sharepoint® and on your company’s productivity.

A SAN built with PS Series storage automatically optimizes its own performance and improves that performance as you add additional arrays to the SAN. If you are planning a large deployment, you may need to isolate the Sharepoint® workload from other application workloads. You can do this by creating separate storage pools for Sharepoint® -related volumes within the PS Series group.

Scalability As your workload grows and storage capacity needs increase, the environment must accommodate changes without affecting users. Storage used in a Sharepoint® Server environment must be highly scalable to accommodate not only growing numbers of users, but also the ever-growing amount of data each user needs to store in Sharepoint®.

Modular PS Series storage arrays provide easy, online scalability.

Recoverability It must be possible to recover from situations that can cause data loss, ranging in scale from a corrupted or infected file to the loss of an entire data center due to hostile action or act of nature.

PS Series storage arrays deliver snapshots and auto-replication technology as standard features, enabling automatic backup and disaster recovery capabilities for your critical data. Designing your environment with separate volumes for SQL databases and logs can improve backup and recovery performance.

Ease of Management Setup and configuration, backup and recovery, and day-to-day administration should be handled easily and have minimal impact on operations and users.

PS Series storage automates complex tasks like RAID configuration and provides both graphical and command line user interfaces for easy and intuitive storage management.

Service Level Commitments Organizations often have varying service level requirements across applications. One application might be critical to business results, while another might require segregation of storage resources to meet application best practices or organizational needs.

PS Series storage allows for differing performance and availability levels through the choice of arrays and RAID levels, while the ability to store data on physically discrete pools allows a PS Series storage to meet data segregation commitments.

MOSS 2007 WITH A PS SERIES SAN The following sections describe Sharepoint® Server requirements and recommendations and the basic tasks for deploying Sharepoint® with a PS Series SAN.

Background Information Before you begin the deployment, we recommend that you review the following documents:

• Sharepoint® Server technical library: Getting started with Office Sharepoint® Server 2007

• Dell EqualLogic DocCenter: Deploying Microsoft® Hyper-V with PS Series Arrays

• Sharepoint® Server TechCenter: Install Office Sharepoint® Server 2007 in a server farm environment

• Dell EqualLogic DocCenter: Deploying Windows® Server 2008 with PS Series SANs

Basic Tasks:

1. Set up a PS Series group and create the volumes required for the Sharepoint® environment (figures 1a & 1b). Be sure to create access control records for each volume to allow the appropriate servers access to the volume.

See the PS Series QuickStart and Group Administration manuals and the EqualLogic Technical Report, Deploying Windows® Server 2008 with PS Series SANs for more information.

2. Optimize the SAN network for performance. See the EqualLogic Technical Report Storage Array Network Performance Guidelines for more information.

3. Install Sharepoint® and SQL server and configure them to use PS Series storage. See figure 1c.The information about specifying the iSCSI disks and installation and deployment requirements for virtual machines (VM’s) are well documented in Deploying Microsoft® Hyper-V with PS Series Arrays .

After deployment, you can expand iSCSI disks online, expand PS Series group capacity, and back up volumes, as described in the EqualLogic Technical Report Deploying Windows® Server 2008 with PS Series SANs.

Fig. 1A WFEMOSS data volume.

Fig. 1B SQLMOSS db volume.

Fig. 1c SQLMOSS&WFEMOSS configure PS Series storage.

Although it’s outside the scope of this whitepaper we should quickly review Sharepoint®’s potential for expediential growth and prudent steps needed to keep your site manageable. For simplicity, a company intranet site may use one top site containing portal sub-sites (Figure 2A). In this way the intranet site will house general company information and ensure the integrity of the intranet taxonomy. You may already foresee some trouble ahead if you only use portal sub-sites for your company intranet. This is because a company intranet can grow very large, very quickly. How can one database hold everything? How can one administrator manage everything? These are very good questions and you may not want to go this route if you foresee your company’s intranet becoming very large.

Fig. 2A Top site containing portal sub-sites (sharing 1 database).

Consider setting up top site collections instead (Figure 2B). The advantage of creating top site collections is they will have their own global navigation and own database, and allow sub-sites to be added. This is recommended for security, maintenance and growth. This is ideal for departmental or team sites each needing their own site collection administrator. This also facilitates the movement of site collections to a different SQL instance in the future. The disadvantage is that the global navigation of the portal is not visible across all top sites, unlike portal sub-sites. In other words, each team site will not be visible on the global navigation link bar and will require a little extra work to provide this navigation.

Fig. 2B Top site collection with sub-sites (each top site having own database).

Choosing a MOSS 2007 Installation

The choices here are Basic (Install single server standalone) using the default settings. Or Advance (choose settings for single server or Sharepoint® farm) and the options for that are:

Complete: Enables all of the options for one server to offer the entire range of MOSS 2007 services and features to the network. You can scale out this deployment, start and stop services on this server and use a SQL server to host your databases.

Web Front End: Enables only those options that allow the server to run as a web front end server. What this means is that the server is merely the entry and exit point (or one of them among the other WFE servers) for the farm.

Stand-Alone: Similar to complete, this option enables all of the services and features for the MOSS 2007 farm, but assumes that there is no SQL server, so the MSDE engine is installed locally on this server. You cannot scale out this server into a larger MOSS 2007 farm.

For this paper we will be using the Advance “Complete” installation, hosting SQL on one guest VM and all other MOSS 2007 services and features on another guest VM, also referred to as a Small Farm. Consolidating servers and making more efficient use of resources is a win-win situation. For small MOSS 2007 farm implementations, particularly intranet scenarios, using virtualization, gives you the ability to tweak and scale the solution as their load or storage demands change. The other reasons to get excited about Microsoft® Office Sharepoint® Server with virtualization are High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR). Both Microsoft®’s Hyper-V and VMware’s vSphere allow you to rapidly and easily deploy a load balanced and clustered MOSS infrastructure, which is ideal for Enterprise mission-critical MOSS deployments. For Microsoft®’s Hyper-V requirements see: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb897498.aspx and for VMware’s vSphere requirements see: http://www.vmware.com/products/

DEPLOYING SHAREPOINT® IN A HYPER-V VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT

Hyper-V needs to be configured as a server role on the 64-bit editions of the Windows® Server 2008 operating system. Additionally, make sure the physical hardware supports hardware-assisted virtualization. Windows® Server 2008 requires at a minimum Office Sharepoint® Server 2007 Service Pack 1. For additional guidance please review the following Sharepoint® Server TechCenter article: Using Sharepoint® Products and Technologies in a Hyper-V virtual environment. To deploy a small server farm, you need at least one virtual server acting as a Web server and an application server, and one virtual server acting as a database server. For this Sharepoint® environment install two Windows® Server 2008 x64 Enterprise Edition virtual servers using Hyper-V. For more information see: Deploying Windows® Server 2008 with PS Series SANs. After the installation process name them SQLMOSS and WFEMOSS and add both to the domain. Both were setup with 2 virtual processors and 4096 MB of memory. SQL Server 2008 x64 Enterprise Edition will then installed on SQLMOSS following best practices for required accounts, surface area and named pipes settings. In SQL Server 2008, the SQL Server Surface Configuration Tool has been replaced with the SQL Server Configuration Manager. To enable remote connections in SQL Server 2008:

1. Open the SQL Server Configuration Manager (Start > SQL Server 2008 > Configuration Tools > SQL Server Configuration Manager

2. Navigate to the SQL Server Network Configuration > Protocols for MSSQLSERVER node in the tree view see Figure 3A

3. Enable TCP/IP and Named Pipes (you’ll be warned that these changes will not apply until you restart the service)

4. Restart the SQL Server Service

Fig. 3A Named Pipes

The next step is to setup the web / application server roles on WFEMOSS. Before you install Office Sharepoint® Server 2007 SP1 on Windows® Server 2008, you must install the Microsoft® .NET Framework version 3.0. This is done from Server Manager, Add Features and selecting .Net Framework 3.0 Features, follow the wizard to install any required role services, see Figure 3B.

Fig. 3B .Net Framework 3.0 Features

Start Office Sharepoint® Server 2007 SP1 setup wizard and after entering your product key, you have a choice of Sharepoint® installation types. Choose Advanced (required for Farm) see Figure 4A.

Fig.4A Fig. 4B

The next screen requires us to select an installation type; since we are building a Sharepoint® Small Farm (all components on one server with SQL on a second server) select Complete. See Figure 4B. Since this server will also be a search server and search index files can be very large select the File Location tab and choose a data volume as the location for the search index files. See Figure 5.

Fig. 5

Next up is the Run Sharepoint® Technologies Configuration Wizard as seen in Figure 6 and the Welcome screen with popup warning see Figure 7. Select next and yes to proceed.

Fig. 6 Fig. 7

On the Connect to a server farm screen select No, I want to create a new server farm. See Figure 8. The Specify Configuration Database Settings are next; enter the SQL server name and keep the default for the configuration database name. Since SQL resides on another server enter an existing database access account in the form of; domain\username and the password. See Figure 9.

Fig. 8 Fig. 9

Configure Sharepoint® Central Administration (CA) Web Application is the next task. You can specify a port number (recommended) for the CA web site hosted on this machine. Write the port number down, you will need it later. For now use the default (NTLM) authentication provider under Configure Security Settings. See Figure 10. Next Figure 11 should display the Configuration Successful screen along with settings. Click finish to open CA homepage.

Fig. 10 Fig. 11

You will see four new tasks under Administrative Tasks shown in Figure 12, click on Initial Deployment: Assign Services to Servers link.

Fig. 12

The page shown in Figure 13 will open, click the Action Link "Initial Deployment: Assign Services to Servers

"

Fig. 13

The following screen will open-up; just make sure you start all required services see Figure 14.

In this case, Excel Calculation Services, Office Sharepoint® Server Search and Windows® Sharepoint® Services Search needed starting.

Fig. 14

Fig. 15

After starting Excel Calculation Services, start Office Sharepoint® Server Search and it will open a page so you can configure the search settings. For this setup select both indexing content and search queries check boxes and provide an e-mail address that will receive any messages about

search services. Next enter a user name and password for the Farm Search Service Account. See Figure 15. Keep the defaults and click start to save the changes and close this page. Next click start for the Windows® Sharepoint® Services Search. A new window will open see Figure 16; use this window to configure how Windows® Sharepoint® Services will index the help files in Sharepoint®. Enter a user name and password to be used as the service account. Next enter a user name and password to be used as the content access account. Accept the default database name and database table name. Configure the indexing schedule or accept the default, keeping in mind that indexing can consume a lot of DB resources and planning the indexing on off peak hours is recommended or may be necessary. Click start when ready. At this point there should not be any services marked as “Required on Farm not running”, although some services are not as yet started and can be revisited later. Click the Home tab to return to the Administrator’s task list and delete any task completed to this point.

Fig. 16

The final task on the Administrator Task list is to configure a Shared Service Provider (SSP), open this task and click the action link; Configure Server Farm’s Shared Services. The Manage this Farm’s Shared Services page will open (Figure 17); click New SSP and you will be presented with a new page (Figure 18) that you will use to specify a SSP name (use the default) and create a new web application required for the SSP administration site. (For additional help see; http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303421.aspx )

Fig. 17

Fig. 18

When you click on create a new web application, a new page will open to define the new SSP web application. Change the port number to a series such as 5005 and notice that the description name of the new IIS web site has changed to reflect the new port number. Accept the defaults until you get to the Application Pool section and confirm that the application pool name reflects the port number you just set for the SSP web application (makes it easier to manage later). Enter a user account and password to be used by the Application Pool. Click OK to save and close this page and return to the SSP configuration page (Figure 18). The next step is to define what web application

My Site will use. Similar to setting up the SSP web application; click on create a new web application; a new page will open to define the new web site. In the IIS web site section, select create a new IIS site and set the port number to a series such as 5050. In the application section, select create a new application pool. Next select configurable, and enter a user account for the application pool. Click OK to save and close this page, and once again return to the SSP configuration page (Figure 18). Next you will enter SSP service credentials and for this setup accept the defaults for the remaining items. Now click OK to save and start creating the SSP. When completed, go to the Home page in CA and note that there is no longer a red warning that your server is not yet configure.

Next we will setup a Portal web site and then setup top site collections. We start by opening Sharepoint® Central Administration Tool and selecting the Application Management tab. Click on Create or extend Web application in the Sharepoint® Web Application Management section. Click Create a new Web Application (Figure 19) and the Create New Web Application page will open (Figure 20). In the IIS Web Site section we could use the default web site or create our own.

Fig. 19

Fig. 20

Since this web application will be used as a user site we will need a site using port 80. For this setup select create a new IIS web site and name it Sharepoint®-80. Set the port to 80, and make sure to stop or remove the default site. The load balance URL should be http://Server-name:80/ where server-name is the name of our WFE / Application server or http://WFEMOSS:80/. Next in

the Application Pool section click create new application pool and name it Sharepoint®-80. Enter a domain\user account and password for this application. Use the default Database server name and set the Database Name to WSS_Content. Use Windows® authentication and click OK to save and create the new web application. When the web application has completed a window will confirm its creation. See Figure 21.

Fig. 21

The next step is to create the site collection and its top site. In Central Administration select the Application Management tab and click Create site collection in the Sharepoint® Site Management section. The Create Site Collection page opens. In the Web Application section; confirm this web application is the one we just created, if not click on the name and select Change Web Application. Next we enter a title and description for this portal site, for this project I’ve entered djc_portal. The URL section shows: http://wfemoss/sites/. For simplicity it is best to remove the “sites” before creating the new site collection. To do that click on Define Managed Paths, select the web application and name the path the same name that you will call your new top site collection. Select explicit inclusion, that causes the ‘sites’ part to disappear. Click OK. In the Template Selection section, choose the Publishing tab and select Collaboration Portal. Enter a primary site administrator account and password and if required a secondary site administrator. Click OK to close the page and start the site creation process. A new page will open when done, click on the link to open your new portal site. It should be similar to Figure 22.

Fig. 22

At this point your site is up and you could add sub sites as your environment grows. So far we have created a portal site with its associated database. Let’s walk through the steps needed to create a top site collection. Since (for ease of growth) we plan for each top site collection to have its own database, you must first set the portal database max sites to 1 and warning to 0. You must be the farm administrator to do this. From Central Administration, click on the Application Management tab and in the Sharepoint® Application Management section click Content Databases then when the Manage Content Databases window opens (Figure 23) click the name of the database to edit and set the max sites to 1 and warning to 0. Now, no more site collections can be stored in this database and you will be forced to create a new database for the next new top site collection. This is also the place you will create new content databases before building new top sites.

Fig. 23

WSS_Content shown in Figure 23 is the database for djc_portal, it also shows WSS_Content_hr and WSS_Content_IT that are the databases for hr and IT top sites. Figure 24 shows the portal site with links to the HR and IT top sites.

Fig. 24

MAINTAINING A SHAREPOINT FARM Watch for orphaned sites (sites that are not listed in the configuration database, or sites that do not exist but that are listed in the configuration database). Orphaned sites can cause problems when it is time to apply updates or perform database maintenance tasks. Clean them up with the Stsadm databaserepair operation. Enforce site and content size limits. Follow recommended guidelines for managing site collections, site, lists, and documents according to business needs, including the following:

• 50,000 site collections per content database

• 50 MB file size limit (recommended) up to 2 GB (maximum)

• 2000 items per list view

Monitor key counters to manage performance

• Throughput. Track how many requests a server farm can process per second to ensure that you are meeting the expected user response time goals.

• Concurrent users. Track how the number of concurrent users correlates with farm performance.

• Data and site growth over time. Track how quickly the database and site are growing, and project how long the current infrastructure can meet your needs. We recommend that you maintain a level of at least 25% free space across disks to allow for growth.

Monitor sites and content and perform clean-ups regularly

Team sites are often self-service and loosely structured to make collaboration easier. Establish and communicate appropriate service level agreements (SLAs) for content archival and content deletion. Consider that team sites often have limited life spans that are determined by the projects they support. Use life-cycle management to remove and archive inactive sites regularly.

Identify and monitor large lists, files, and sites. This includes lists with a very large number of items (more than tens of thousands) or many fields, operations involving very large files (more than 50 MB), and items with many versions.

Monitor Web Part statistics, site activity (last updated, last read), and disk storage to determine site health.

SQL SERVER DATA MANAGEMENT Data integrity is vital in a solid SQL Server environment. Backing up your data as well as monitoring for disk space usage are two important disk management tasks. You should monitor your SQL volumes so they do not fill up unexpectedly. When a volume starts to get full, you may want to consider increasing the volume size, as described below.

Expanding SAN Storage Online

As storage requirements grow for each application, PS Series storage can be easily expanded, online and with no disruption to users.

For example, you can increase the size of a PS Series volume using the Group Manager GUI or the command line interface (CLI). You must then enable the operating system to recognize the size increase. The additional space will be immediately available for use. This procedure is described in the EqualLogic Technical Report Microsoft® Windows®: Expanding Basic Disk Volumes.

Backing up SharePoint

With Sharepoint® Server 2007 there are two backup utilities, one is stsadm.exe and the other is a utility included in Sharepoint® Central Administration. To use the CA backup utility, log into Central Administration and select the Operations tab. Under the Backup and Restore section click Perform backup and a new window will open where you will select components to backup (Figure 25). Select Farm then click Continue to Backup Options. Under type of backup section keep the default full (Figure 26). Next select a backup location, this example used \\WFEMOSS\MossBKUP. Make sure your shared disk resource has the correct permissions; SQL service account, WSS Timer service account and the Central Administration application pool account. A Backup and Restore Status page will open see Figure 27.

FIG. 25

Fig. 26

Fig. 27

SUMMARY

An iSCSI SAN comprised of Dell EqualLogic PS Series storage provides an ideal storage infrastructure for a Sharepoint® installation. A PS Series SAN brings all the reliability and

performance needed for a successful deployment, enabling scalability as the Sharepoint® installation grows, while maintaining availability.

An important part of a successful Sharepoint® installation is to follow Microsoft®’s recommendations for system and server configurations. In addition, you should follow the configuration best practices described in this Technical Report, regarding PS Series group setup, server setup, and deployment, to ensure a robust installation that will meet your needs now and in the future. The best practices described here apply to Microsoft® Sharepoint® Server 2007 running on Microsoft® Windows® Server 2008 working with any PS Series SAN.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Troubleshooting for Office SharePoint Server 2007 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc462944.aspx

How do I open the firewall port for SQL Server on Windows Server 2008? http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/968872

Performance and capacity requirements for Hyper-V: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd277865.aspx Using SharePoint Products and Technologies in a Hyper-V virtual environment http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc816955.aspx Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/default.aspx

TECHNICAL SUPPORT AND CUSTOMER SERVICE Dell’s support service is available to answer your questions about PS Series arrays. If you have an Express Service Code, have it ready when you call. The code helps Dell’s automated-support telephone system direct your call more efficiently.

Contacting Dell Dell provides several online and telephone-based support and service options. Availability varies by country and product, and some services may not be available in your area.

For customers in the United States, call 800-945-3355.

Note: If you do not have an Internet connection, you can find contact information on your purchase invoice, packing slip, bill, or Dell product catalog.

To contact Dell for sales, technical support, or customer service issues:

1. Visit support.dell.com.

2. Verify your country or region in the Choose A Country/Region drop-down menu at the bottom of the window.

3. Click Contact Us on the left side of the window.

4. Select the appropriate service or support link based on your need.

5. Choose the method of contacting Dell that is convenient for you.

Online Services You can learn about Dell products and services on the following websites:

• www.dell.com/

• www.dell.com/ap/ (As ian/Pacific countries only)

• www.dell.com/jp (Japan only)

• www.euro.dell.com (Europe only)

• www.dell.com/la (Latin American countries)

• www.dell.ca (Canada only)

You can access Dell Support through the following websites:

• support.dell.com

• support.dell.com/EqualLogic

• support.jp.dell.com (Japan only)

• support.euro.dell.com (Europe only)