Archive for the ‘Configuring SharePoint Installations’ Category

« PREVIOUS

Understanding Cloud Deployment Models

November 27th, 2012
Posted by: Donna Hemmert

By Donna Hemmert
AIS Network Vice President, Strategic Development

Public Cloud, Private Cloud or Hybrid Cloud?  Which one is for me?

First of all, let’s define the Cloud.  A Cloud is a consolidation of hosted computer services (storage, computing power) and is delivered as a service.

Cloud services are often fully managed by the provider and are usually sold based on usage (for example, per hour or even by the minute). One of the main benefits of the Cloud is that it is elastic, allowing organizations to use as much resources as they need.  They can easily add or reduce those services without the need to deploy equipment.  This can be really useful in situations where companies have a project (for example, a development project or marketing promotion that requires a special new temporary website) or their business has a lot of associated seasonality (i.e., they need more computing resources for the Christmas season).  In that case, a company can call a company such as AISN and simply request another “virtual machine” or more storage.

Many of our customers like the cloud model also since they don’t have to put out upfront capital for equipment and software, but instead can pay a set amount each month.  It’s more predictable and it is captured as an operational expense, which can be beneficial.

As for the deployment models, here are the main types of Cloud:

  • Public Cloud is a cloud that is available to all customers and these customers share the resources of the cloud.  Examples of public clouds are Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure  and Google Cloud.
  • Private Cloud allocates resources to be used solely by your organization from a shared infrastructure.  Your data is stored in dedicated, segregated silos.  With Private Cloud, adding more storage or CPU is easy and often instantly available.
  • Dedicated Private Cloud is a cloud infrastructure built solely for your organization’s use – with all services and hardware dedicated to your organization.  Some organizations prefer dedicated private cloud for additional security but the down side is that there are reduced economies of scale. That being said, adding and reducing computing resources is much easier to do as with any cloud.
  • Community Cloud shares infrastructure between several organizations from a specific community with common concerns (security, compliance, jurisdiction, etc.).  This allows the community to customize the cloud based on these concerns and spread the cost – making it generally more cost effective than a private cloud, but less so than a public cloud.
  • Hybrid Cloud is a combination of more than one cloud type.  For example, you can combine a private cloud with a public cloud.  This will give you benefits of more than one deployment model.  Often an organization will deploy hybrid clouds to provide the flexibility of in-house applications with the fault tolerance and scalability of cloud-based services.

 

TAGS:

CATEGORIES:

No Comments »

Cleaning Out the SharePoint Site Recycle Bin

July 16th, 2012
Posted by: admin

By Terry Engelstad
MCP, MCSE, CCNA, MCDBA, MCTS, MCITP
AIS Network Operations Manager

Recently, a SharePoint hosting customer asked us to perform routine maintenance on his SharePoint site.  As part of that, he asked us to clean out the Recycle Bin and have the automatic deletion mechanism disabled for the Recycle Bin.  He said that his company hadn’t cleaned its SharePoint Recycle Bin in over one year.

There are some things you might find interesting about the Recycle Bin, which is the first line of defense in recovering data. As you probably know, SharePoint uses a two-tier Recycle Bin. The first tier is at the User level where an item deleted from a List or Library will drop into the User Recycle Bin. This way, the Users can recover deleted items themselves. Then after a period of time, items will be moved from the User Recycle Bin to a Site Collection Recycle Bin. The duration for which an item sits in the User Recycle Bin is determined by a parameter in SharePoint Central and is specific to an entire Web Application.  The duration for which items will sit in the Site Collection Recycle Bin is determined by the amount of space available to hold these items and is also configurable via a parameter in SharePoint Central.

Currently, our customer’s User Recycle Bin is configured to never delete items.  There are quite a few items in various User Recycle Bins. There are two ways to clean them out.  First, somebody can go to each of the User Recycle Bins and remove items manually.  Or, second, the retention configuration parameter could be changed to a very low value, and after a period of time, the items will flush out on their own.

The difference between these two techniques is that the first one requires human intervention to find all the Recycle Bins and to make decisions about which items should be deleted or not. The second option is global and will affect all items in all Recycle Bins.

Naturally, if our client wants us to clean out the User Recycle Bins individually, they would also need to define the rules for deletion of those items (i.e., delete everything older than 30 days, for example).

On the other hand, if the customer wants us to change the configuration parameters, we’d be happy to do so.  That’s easy.

More questions about your hosted SharePoint?  Leave your comments below.

TAGS:

CATEGORIES:

10 Comments »

Slow SharePoint Server? If your SharePoint Loads Slowly, This May Be Why.

July 9th, 2012
Posted by: admin

 

By Terry Engelstad
MCP, MCSE, CCNA, MCDBA, MCTS, MCITP
AIS Network Operations Manager

Is your SharePoint Server running slow?

Recently, a client emailed to say that he was noticing large slowdowns in connecting to their SharePoint server at AISN.  It seems to be happening nightly and intermittently throughout the day, he said.  Specifically, his issues were:

  1. SharePoint content loads slowly
  2. Uploading/ downloading from SharePoint is impossible (speeds come to a crawl at less than 5KBps)
  3. Remoting in to the SharePoint server is very slow

He asked what could be causing a slow SharePoint Server and SharePoint SQL Server.  Here’s the problem in his case.

The servers, in general, are starving for memory.  The hypervisor on which they reside (XYZ1) has only 74 MB of free memory.  Microsoft recommends not dropping below 2 GB of free memory on a hypervisor.

See the image below for XYZ1 (real names changed to protect client).

Slow SharePoint

As I explained to our client, the server “SharePoint” has 0 free memory and is warning that it needs more.  It looks like the vast majority of the memory on SharePoint is being consumed by w3wp.exe – IIS Application Pools. This would certainly contribute to slow web page rendering.  And with 0 free memory, anybody who remotes into it will take more memory away from the Application Pools, thereby making it slower.

In our client’s case, the server “SharePointSQL” is grossly overtaxed.  I count 68 databases defined and live.  This is way, way too much for a SQL Server with only 8 GB of memory.  The Microsoft recommendation is 8 GB of memory for a lightly used SharePoint Foundation Farm and 16 GB for a lightly used SharePoint Server Farm.

This level of memory, combined with the number of databases, will create very small page caching (perhaps not even caching at all).  This will seriously degrade the speed of uploading documents.

As you may or may not know, SharePoint stores all documents as Binary Large Objects (BLOBs).  In order to properly convert, for example, a Word document to a BLOB, it must cache the entire uploaded document somewhere before it can go through the conversion to a BLOB. So again, small or non-existent cache, means real slow upload and download times, among other slownesses.

In this case, adding more memory is the solution to a slow SharePoint Server.   However, a SharePoint private cloud would be an ideal approach – one that allows for the flexibility and scalability this client needs to accommodate growth smoothly.

TAGS:

CATEGORIES:

3 Comments »

SharePoint 2010 Security: Adding an SSL Certificate to Your Hosted SharePoint Site

June 11th, 2012
Posted by: admin

By Bill Peters
AIS Network Director of Sales

SSL certificates create secure (HTTPS) connectivity between your Web server and your visitors’ browsers.  If you are transmitting sensitive information via a Web site, such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers or other personal information, you should secure it with SSL encryption to safeguard against others seeing your data.  If you do not use an SSL certificate, then you are vulnerable.

SharePoint Security

SSL certificates aid in ensuring data security for your hosted SharePoint site.

In a SharePoint environment, SSL certificates can easily be added to a hosted site in order to secure it.  There are different kinds of SSL certificates but I won’t address that in this blog.  Rather, this is about SharePoint 2010 security and the recent request by one client that we add an SSL certificate to his existing hosted SharePoint site with us.

In preparation, I asked him what domain name he wanted on the SSL certificate.   Unsure of my question, he responded, “Doesn’t the domain name have to match the domain of the (AISN) network?”

Here’s how I explained it to him.   In his case, the server hosting his SharePoint is a member server in the Active Directory domain called aisn.local.  Web sites which serve Web pages from this server (SharePoint included) can be addressed by either an IP address or a domain name.  This Web site domain is not the same type of domain as the Active Directory domain in which the server resides.  And actually, Active Directory domains such as aisn.local cannot be present on the Internet.  The ‘.local’ indicates to the Internet that it is a private, not a public, domain name.

That said, it is possible to have an SSL Certificate for either type of domain.  The real question is what are you going to use it for?  That was for my client to decide.

As I explained to him, if you intend to use the SSL Certificate for Server Identification, then we can get a certificate for you for “yournamehere.aisn.local”.  You would use this type of certificate when, for example, you remote desktop to the server.  It would guarantee that you are connecting to the right server.

If, however, you want to use the SSL Certificate for identification of your SharePoint Site, then you can pick any public name you want.  In this case, the domain must be registered publicly in order to get a public SSL Certificate.

So, for example, if you chose to address your SharePoint Site by the name “sp.yournamehere.com”, you would need to make sure that the domain name “yournamehere.com” is registered to you.  Then, you can define “sp.yournamehere.com” in IIS on your SharePoint server. You would also need to configure the public DNS for yournamehere.com such that the “host” known as “sp” points to the IP address on the server.

That explanation seemed clarify things for him.  I told him that I thought he was looking for the latter, but we do not know what his host and domain names are.  It appeared to me that he was addressing his SP site by IP address currently.  In order to assign an SSL certificate, it needs to have a full name.  We cannot register it to an IP.

Have more questions about hosted SharePoint 2010 and hosted SharePoint security?  Send me an email and I’d be happy to help.

TAGS:

CATEGORIES:

5 Comments »

Private SharePoint Cloud: For Large Enterprises, It’s the Way to Go

March 21st, 2012
Posted by: admin

By Jay Atkinson
AIS Network CEO

Just last week, we made a bold statement that has captured quite a bit of attention within the SharePoint community.

We revealed that we are now deploying SharePoint Server 2010 in a single private cloud for less than our competitors are charging for a public or hybrid cloud implementation.  And, we expressed our strong view that enterprise-class Microsoft SharePoint 2010 customers should look only to private cloud environments.  In short, it’s the only way to go based on sheer practicality and bang-for-the buck.

private cloud

Enterprise-class SharePoint Server 2010 is hosted most cost-effectively in a private cloud.

Plain and simple, you want the most control over your SharePoint 2010 environment with the least hit to your organization’s bottom line, and you get every bit of that and more by moving from a traditional deployment to a hosted private cloud architecture.

Currently, hosting providers are steering enterprise-class SharePoint 2010 customers toward public cloud and hybrid cloud hosting models.  Our cost analysis research shows that those deployment approaches are needlessly costing more than they should and the customer sacrifices control at multiple levels.

A private SharePoint cloud is simply more economical and easier to manage for a large organization with security and compliance concerns.  An enterprise SharePoint Server 2010 platform implemented wholly in a private cloud, including the online storage components, exceeds core compliance requirements and surpasses the benefits of a public cloud or hybrid cloud.

With SharePoint 2010 deployed entirely in a private cloud, the customer gets:

  • a hosted environment that is exclusively internal to the organization,
  • complete control of its servers, security, permissions, policies and customization,
  • seamless federation between line-of-business systems and various data sources,
  • quick scalability for system resources, and
  • the ability to move other core applications and platforms to the same private cloud.

Public cloud services like Microsoft Office 365’s SharePoint Online and deployments of SharePoint Server 2010 in a public or hybrid cloud are okay for small to mid-size businesses, but they’re very impractical when it comes to serving the best interests of a large business.

The private SharePoint cloud model is an ideal outsourcing alternative.  Sooner or later, global and large enterprises evaluating SharePoint 2010 deployment platforms are going to realize that an enterprise SharePoint Server 2010 platform implemented solely in a private cloud is, indeed, the only way to go.

Have a different opinion?  I’d love to hear your thoughts below.  Need a free quote on a Private SharePoint Cloud?  Naturally, we’d be happy to help you with that.

 

TAGS:

CATEGORIES:

5 Comments »

SharePoint and SQL Server: Give It Memory

March 15th, 2012
Posted by: admin

By Terry Engelstad
MCP, MCSE, CCNA, MCDBA, MCTS, MCITP
AIS Network Operations Manager

If you are not familiar with how SQL Server works, you should know that it does, in fact, use memory for caching of data.  If you don’t give it enough memory, then it won’t cache enough data.  If you don’t cache enough of the right data, then you must go to disk to get it.  If you have to go to disk to get it, then you are making excessive trips to the SAN to retrieve data, thereby reducing the overall efficiency to everybody on the SAN.

I’ve done a couple hundred installations of SharePoint, and I am definitely a believer in “more is better.”   When it comes to SharePoint, you absolutely must give it memory – and lots of it.  You cannot get away with shorting memory and disk space.

If you really want to tick off a customer, take a SharePoint Site that has a reasonable amount of traffic and start reducing the amount of memory SQL Server has to work with.  See how long it takes for that customer to start complaining.  It won’t take long.

 

TAGS:

CATEGORIES:

2 Comments »

SQL Server 2012: What’s New?

March 6th, 2012
Posted by: admin

By Laurie Head
AIS Network Vice President

What is SQL Server 2012?  When will it be here?  What’s new in it?

SQL Server 2012 is a major new release from Microsoft, and it’s due for general availability on April 1.  At that time, three versions are expected:  Enterprise, Business Intelligence and Standard.  The company is making evaluation downloads of SQL Server 2012 available today, however.

SQL Server

The online launch event for SQL Server 2012 is tomorrow.

“Data is being generated faster than ever before, and organizations need a way to process and analyze all that data,” said Microsoft Corporate Vice President Ted Kummert, during today’s announcement of the next month’s release.

“Whatever the type or size of data, SQL Server 2012 delivers the platform and familiar tools to manage data, generate actionable insights and help drive business impact.”

Also chiming in was Klout, a leading provider of influence measurement and a SQL Server 2012 customer.

“Our business depends on delivering customers fast, detailed insight into hundreds of terabytes of social-network data,” said David Mariani, Klout vice president of engineering.

“With SQL Server 2012 and integrated business intelligence tools, we’re processing massive volumes of data queries in near-real time. Microsoft’s data platform has continued to advance and help us keep up with the evolving world of data.”

Here’s a brief recap from today’s news:

What Is SQL Server 2012? SQL Server 2012 is a data platform that can store, manage and analyze all of your information, including business-critical relational databases and data warehouses as well as data from inside the organization and in the cloud.  It also offers a set of tools to analyze both structured and unstructured data and deliver insights that everyone can easily interpret and act upon.

What’s new about SQL Server 2012? SQL Server 2012 succeeds Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, and the update is significant.  It’s more scalable, more reliable and delivers greater performance than ever before.  More than 200 performance, scalability and reliability improvements to the database have been made.

SQL Server 2012’s in-memory data-visualization component, a business intelligence function called Power View, is something that the company has been developing for years under the code name “Crescent.”  According to Kummert’s blog, “Power View provides users with a powerful interactive capability that transforms the exploration of any data, anywhere, into a more natural, immersive experience. Ultimately this encourages better decision-making – a significant benefit, with massive implications in today’s era of big data.”

Another new feature in SQL Server 2012, called “AlwaysOn,” is part of the high-availability and disaster recovery system.  It’s said to reduce planned and unplanned downtime.

The new ColumnStore Indexing feature reportedly boosts performance by up to 10 times when doing star joins and analytic queries that make use of selected columns of data.

A business intelligence semantic model helps users tie together reporting, analytics, scorecards and dashboards.

New security and encryption features enable administrators to separate duties, expose services and features to the right people, protect data and ensure compliance.

Is SQL Server 2012 Proven? According to Microsoft, quite a few customers have been invited to kick the tires on this release.  SQL Server 2012 has already been deployed for production use by hundreds of global, industry-leading customers, such as Volvo Car Corporation, Revlon, the HSN, Sanofi Pasteur, Klout and LG Chemical.

Will SQL Server 2012 Improve Performance? Microsoft and partners also announced today that SQL Server 2012 has demonstrated several new performance benchmarks through partner- and Microsoft-led testing that underscore SQL Server’s ability to scale across the enterprise.

Can SQL Server 2012 Tackle Big Data? IT research firm Gartner estimates that the volume of global data is growing at a rate of 59 percent per year, with 70 to 85 percent in unstructured form.* Furthering its commitment to connect SQL Server and rich business intelligence tools, such as Microsoft Excel, PowerPivot for Excel 2010 and Power View, with unstructured data, Microsoft announced plans to release an additional limited preview of an Apache Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure in the first half of 2012.

Since the first limited preview released in December, customers such as Webtrends and the University of Dundee are using the Hadoop-based service to glean simple, actionable insights from complex data sets hosted in the cloud.  Customers interested in signing up for the latest preview should visit http://www.hadooponazure.com.

Will SQL Server 2012 Help ROI? Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to perform a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study on the potential benefits of upgrading to SQL Server 2012.  The study reports a potential Return on Investment (ROI) of up to 189 percent with a 12-month payback period.

When is the SQL Server 2012 Launch Event? Tomorrow.  Register for the online launch event here: http://www.sqlserverlaunch.com/ww/Home

What do you think you will like about the new SQL Server 2012?

 

*Gartner Symposium Presentation, Information Management Goes “Extreme”: The Biggest Challenges for 21st-Century CIOs, Mark Beyer, October 2011.

TAGS:

CATEGORIES:

4 Comments »

SharePoint 2010: Loopback Checking

March 1st, 2012
Posted by: admin

By Terry Engelstad
MCP, MCSE, CCNA, MCDBA, MCTS, MCITP
AIS Network Operations Manager

There is a security feature in Windows 2008 called Loopback Checking.  It’s a security feature in IIS, which is a way of stopping some denial of service attacks.  Since SharePoint 2010 runs locally on the server, and accesses its own databases by way of Communication Foundation service calls through IIS, technically, SharePoint is performing what could be construed as a self-denial-of-service-attack.  There is a registry hack to turn off the feature.

This feature is only an issue on servers which are domain controllers and running SharePoint and SQL Server at the same time.  Loopback Checking is not a problem on servers which are not domain controllers, nor in multi-server farm scenarios where SQL Server is not running on the same server as IIS.

For more information about disabling the loopback check, see Microsoft Support Article 896861.

TAGS:

CATEGORIES:

6 Comments »

SharePoint Migrations: How Long Does a Migration and Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 Take?

December 1st, 2011
Posted by: admin

By Terry Engelstad
MCP, MCSE, CCNA, MCDBA, MCTS, MCITP
AIS Network Operations Manager

Recently, a visitor to our Web site asked an excellent question.  How long does a migration and upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 take?  The answer to this question is very complex and depends on a number factors.  The subject is much more complex than can be explained in a mere couple of paragraphs but here’s a very brief response.

SharePoint Migration AIS Network

It's important to understand that a migration to SharePoint 2010 may take some time.

First of all, his question is not about just a migration.  It is about a migration and an upgrade.  The answer depends on the following:

1)  There are at least three different ways to migrate and upgrade SharePoint sites:

  • Site by site
  • Database detach/re-attach
  • In-place upgrade

2)  The size of the databases involved is huge in determining the duration.

3)  The type of documents in Content.

4) What customizations have been enabled in the SharePoint 2007 implementation? Some may not “migrate.”

5)  The speed of the server(s) involved.

As a point of reference, we recently did a migration and upgrade to SharePoint 2010 for a client.  It took approximately four weeks to plan, test, and finally do the deed.  The actual migration/upgrade took approximately 24 hours.  This client has a 100 GB Content database and they did a database detach/re-attach and then an in-place upgrade. The only customizations that they made in their 2007 environment were to the visual theme, which did not migrate (it’s a known issue).

For those of you who are planning a migration, we’d be interested in hearing more of your questions.

TAGS:

CATEGORIES:

3 Comments »

SharePoint Hosting White Paper Rolling Out on Thursday

August 10th, 2011
Posted by: Michael Emrich

SharePoint White Paper

AIS Network has released a new white paper, "To Cloud or Not to Cloud: SharePoint 2010 Hosting Options...and Which One Is Right for You."

By Michael Emrich – Associate, Marketing & Sales

This Thursday will be a big day for AIS Network. Not only will it be the first day of SharePoint Saturday in Northern Virginia, an event we will be attending for the first time, but we will also be rolling out our first-ever white paper. Entitled, “To Cloud or Not to Cloud: SharePoint 2010 Hosting Options…and Which One is Right for You,” the white paper will serve as both a guide to SharePoint and its hosting and an in-depth analysis of the rapidly-growing cloud-based hosting platform for SharePoint.

The paper will serve as a guide to the many hosting options that SharePoint users have available to them. Some of the questions addressed in the paper include:

  • What are your SharePoint hosting options?
  • What are the pros and cons of each option?
  • In what situations would each be preferable?
  • What does each method need from you in order to work?

Selecting a hosting method needs to be a very educated decision, and this white paper is your text book.

The cloud-based hosting method will be discussed in great length, chronicling the explosive growth of hosting SharePoint in the cloud and what kind of options you’ll have available to you. The whole concept of cloud computing is still a relatively new one, so this white paper will hopefully educate you and clear up any misconceptions that you might have about the cloud.

So, if you’re going to be at SharePoint Saturday in Northern Virginia, stop by Booth #419 and pick up a copy. Or, if you’re more interested in an electronic copy, keep an eye out for the white paper’s pdf release on the company Web site.

TAGS:

CATEGORIES:

16 Comments »

« Older Entries