Establishing Environment Best Practices T12 Brendan Law

Editor's Notes

• #2: I have been working for Thomas Duryea in Melbourne for a year now and am keen to share the experience I have gained from my Australian projectsHave been working with SharePoint for 4 yearsStarted off as a developer on the 2003 versionNow I specialise in solution design and implementations
• #3: AD – use existing or create new domain?Service Accounts – how many are needed?DB Platform – The good, the bad and the unworkableWindows Platform – Patches and partitionsData planning – How much space will we need, and where should our data go?Virtualisation – Which roles are best to virtualise?Topologies – and which ones fit best with various situations
• #4: A fully secured Internet Publishing site is going to require a bit more work than a small IntranetThere is no one right way to deploy any SharePoint farm, with so many options and factors to take into account, it is probable that you will get different answers from different peopleThis is based on my experience, and I’m still learning things about SharePoint everyday!So let me know if you’ve got it working in a different way, or tried it my way and not had as much success as I have
• #5: A healthy domain makes a worthwhile SharePoint investment, as AD is the foundation on which a good SharePoint platform is builtMake sure you know what group policies are going to be applied to your SharePoint server
• #6: This is the typical scenario, where all SharePoint users are located on the local domainUsing local domain accounts also allows the people picker and profile imports to work with minimum hassleYou may need to also apply special group policy to these accounts, such as allowing ‘run as service’ which will be easier if they are all in the same OU
• #7: Yes, it can be a bit of a pain having to manage another AD domain, but you really don’t want your corporate domain to be compromisedOnce configured properly, users won’t be able to tell the differenceAlternatively, you could use stand alone servers and Forms Based Authentication for external users
• #8: At a minimum:Once the install and configuration has been completed, the account can be demoted to a user on the machineThe main SharePoint service accountFarm Services include things like the Timer Service, Administration ServiceThe crawl account needs to be separate, if not it will index draft and unpublished documents
• #9: For increased securityThese accounts are generally optionalIn my installs, I use a separate Search Service account, to isolate SharePoint’s functional areasExtra web application pool accounts provide increased security isolation, meaning that if one of your accounts is compromised by an attacker, there is less chance of them being able to access sensitive data on other sitesFor Internet facing SharePoint sites, architects should lean towards higher security best practicesUsing a separate SSP account allows for the further isolation of functional areasFinally, the SQL service account will be used to run the database services
• #10: SharePoint performance and stability is dictated primarily by the performance and stability of your database platformIf you are thrust into being a DBA as well as a SharePoint administrator, study up on SQL, lots of great info on the net and training courses available ** Previous Session?
• #11: Perfect world scenario, great for large corporate Intranets, but only really feasible for Internet publishing sitesAll 64 bit means that you will be ready for upgrade to 2010 too!Best in performance and manageability
• #12: The usual scenario, good for most SharePoint deploymentsDefine maximum page load time as an SLA, and then performance test SQL to make sure the platform will meet standardsAsk questions about who is maintaining it, and include in your governance plan
• #13: Sometimes the case if SharePoint deployment is not properly plannedOnce again, performance testing will tell you whether we need to look at an alternative solutionAvoid this at all costs, recently had to deal with this at a client site, and we deployed a new SQL instance on the SharePoint ServerCan even be better installing a local copy of SQL Server
• #14: Using a standard configuration and maintaining your windows servers should already be part of your organisational practicesThese are a few recommendations that will benefit your SharePoint environment
• #15: Keeping your Windows Server updated should be a standard practise anywayWho knows what WSUS is?Pays to monitor WSUS to ensure updates are being applied successfullyUsing a dedicated SQL server makes it easier to test and schedule outages for service pack upgradesRun the SharePoint service pack with the /extract switch to create a slip stream install
• #16: Having dedicated System and Data partitions ensures that Windows patches can always be appliedAlso, there can be performance gains from creating the partitions on separate disks, especially on the Index and Query rolesI like to make directories where all solutions and install binaries are placed before they are installed, in case they need to be reinstalled
• #17: Database servers can be set up similarly, with a system partition for Windows and Program FilesA data partition, where the actual SharePoint data will be stored, should be redundantKeep in mind that updates to the mdf file are made asynchronously
• #18: Your logs partition should be as fast as possible as this is where all the action happensYou can also improve performance by putting the tempdb on a fast disk as wellYou will probably only need a specific backup partition if you do not have a 3rd party backup solutionIf your backups are going to be archived off to another server, this partition will be used for temporary storage of your .bak files, and should be about 3 times the size of your data partitionCan be on less performant disks, as long as there is enough space
• #19: How many documents/how much content is your SharePoint installation going to hold?We need to predict uptake of SharePoint as a document storage location, and plan for future growth
• #20: Obviously, SharePoint’s various purposes are going to result in different storage needsKeeping unlimited numbers of old versions of documents can have a significant impact on content database size, so ensure that you limit the number of major and minor document versionsSetting initial database size reduces file system fragmentation of databasesYou can set this size in SQL management studio by pre-creating your databases, and then simply using your pre-created databases during web application configurationYou will need to use psconfig if you want to pre-create your admin content database, but this shouldn’t be necessary
• #21: This is not a best practice, but is the default, so is a common occurrenceNot as much of an issue if My Sites are hosted in their own web application
• #22: Create new content database from Central AdministrationSetting a content database to offline simply means that no new site collections can be created in it, existing site collections will still be accessibleIf new site collections are required within your business content database, they will need to be created by an administrator
• #23: Creating content databases for different types of content is a more advanced choice when you need different backup strategies for varying types of contentIf your document migration is going to result in content databases over 100GB in size, these should be split for performance reasonsI recently came across the need for this at a client where data storage gets charged back to the departmentUse this when your governance plan stipulates the need for a dedicated SharePoint Administrator
• #24: Who has created a SQL maintenance plan?SQL maintenance plans are a simple way to ensure that your databases are being backed up and maintained, especially if you don’t have a DBA looking after your database serversPlans are set up via a drag and drop design surface, built into SQL management console
• #25: The first plan will back up all your SharePoint content, configuration and search databasesThe system databases include model, master, and msdbOptionally, Transaction logs can be backed up to give point in time restores on databases with full recoveryAnd finally, a plan should be set up to run optimisations including re-indexingNote that shrinking your databases to claim space will only result in the files becoming fragmented when SQL server needs to allocate more space to the database