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SharePoint Thoughts
A blog centered on Windows® SharePoint® Services
Posted by Maurice Prather
Planning of moving to SharePoint 2010?
 
If the answer is yes, then start planning on upgrading your hardware.
 
How much hardware?
 
That's hard to say specifically but let me throw out a number... 3x
 
What?  You're telling me that I need 3x the hardware to move over to 2010?!?
 
Yes and no.  Let's look at how we can set up a rule of thumb designed to help establish expectations for those planning to rollout 2010.
 
Before you hit that delete button while you're muttering "Maurice has lost his mind", let me point out a few things to help illustrate this rule of thumb.
 
First and foremost, SharePoint 2010 is big.  It has more features and certainly does things considerably different than any of its predecessors (look at the new services architecture).
 
A "demo" install of SharePoint (aka single click, single server) of SharePoint 2010 when stacked up against the current version clearly points out that infrastructure side of the application is considerable larger.  Remember the days when a 2007 MOSS install looked huge?  And how nowadays it just looks "normal"?  Well, 2010 now looks huge.  More databases, more accounts, more services, etc.
 
Want another measure of growth?  From a developer's point of view, the API has also grown tremendously.  You now have the CSOM, Sandbox solutions, REST, more features, more this and that...  simply put, the number of things you can do has grown well beyond a 3x factor.
 
All of this consumes resources - in the form of disk operations, memory, cache files, etc.
 
Step back and look at what you have today...
 
Some folks will honestly find that migrating/upgrading their SharePoint 2007 system over to 2010 is not a big hit on their hardware budget.  Why?
 
They planned for growth and probably bought machines that were much beefier than they needed at the time.  These folks probably looked at a 5 year growth plan.  If they kept a measured growth rate, chances are they have extra room on their system to accommodate the new version w/o having to do much.  If they are lucky, the may need to buy a server, upgrade disks, upgrade ram.
 
Let's call these folks Type 1 systems.
 
Some folks probably looked at a smaller growth plan of about a year, if at all.  These folks will find that upgrading to SharePoint 2010 is possible on current hardware, but that system performance and/or time to upgrade is pretty darn bad.  They will most likely need to buy several different servers to appropriately build out their new farm.
 
Let's call these folks Type 2 systems.
 
Finally, there will be some folks that stood up SharePoint 2007 on whatever was available at the time.  They had no real plan for improvement other than "buy more hardware".  In fact, some of these folks might still be using x86 servers.
 
Let's call these folks Type 3 systems.
 
And now look forward...
 
Now, let's start looking at what your farm does today versus what you want to do tomorrow... and you have to ask yourself the following questions:
  1. Looking at your system today, how would you categorize your current day farm (Type 1, 2 or 3)?
  2. How much breathing room do you have with your current implementation?
  3. What do you want to optimize (or tweak) using the new services architecture?

Bear in mind, that Microsoft is still in the process of producing capacity numbers.  This is all really very new.  However, I think we can start to paint an expectation of how much hardware you will need to buy in order to accommodate SharePoint 2010.

Here's how I roughly see things breaking down with one big assumption: keep things on a fairly even level of service.

System qualification
Rough hardware requirements **
Type 1
1.5x - 2x
Type 2
2x - 4x
Type 3
> 4x

** This is a fuzzy table.  I know my descriptions may not map very well to your exact scenario.  So use this as a rough guideline for same service levels.

The reality is that most folks will probably not fit into the Type 1 scenario outlined above.  Only the most recent or best planned (and executed) growth strategies will actually see a 2010 rollout as requiring minimal hardware. 

Type 2 systems are probably going to be the majority of systems out there.  A few systems will be ready for the hardware acquisition because they already saw the writing on the wall either because their system is growing or they've been planning on the version upswing.  Other systems out are probably going to take the opportunity to move older, less performance-oriented systems out to the pasture; thus, infusing better machines alongside the version upgrade.  It's safe to say you can probably expect an average 3x hardware requirement.

Type 3 systems are completely in the reactive category.  Yes, there are still folks out there happily rendering pages on 32-bit hardware.  Yes, there are folks out there that used the spare machines that nobody wanted.  In short, SharePoint was put on the minimum hardware because it wasn't seen as important service.  Chances are that now SharePoint is business critical. Now it's time to uprade and the price is going to be pretty steep.

Another way of looking at ... draw a bell curve right across the top of the table.  T1 and T3 sit on the tails, T2 sits in the middle of the bell. Where do you fit?

What are the lessons that we can take from this discussion?

  1. You will need more hardware.
     
  2. Capacity planning is critical.  If you haven't done it in the past, put it on your To Do list.  It will not make the cost of any upgrade go away, but it can lessen the cost over time.  Type 3 systems should make it a goal to never be a Type 3 again.
     
  3. If you're a system that is utilizing Virtualization, don't assume you can just create more VMs.  I've seen too many folks basically throw out all good planning with one simple statement of "we'll spin up another VM".  VMs are great, but you need to account for the impact of a new VM against other guests as well as the carefully examine the impact on the host system.  Consideration should be given for more VM hosts.
     
  4. You will need more hardware - for your developers. It's probably very fair to say that most developer machines (especially laptops for the road warriors) need some major love.  Last month at the MVP summit, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many folks had new laptops.  Why?  Well, it basically boils down to one small fact - SharePoint 2010 needs the extra horsepower.  Laptops and dev machines that are more than say 12-14 months old will need more ram/cpu/iops. 

As I mentioned in the table above, the range of hardware costs is really intended to address same levels of operation and configuration. If you decide to leverage the new service architecture to build a services farm or some other variation of service offloading, then it should be pretty obvious that your hardware costs are going to be much higher.  :)

Summary...
Assess your current day system.  Focus on building a good capacity plan for tomorrow's system. Plan on acquiring more hardware - the rule of thumb is that you will need more hardware no matter what you do.
 
-Maurice
 
 
Posted @ 6:52 PM on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 | Comments:
Posted by Maurice Prather
The other day I ran across a little problem that was somewhat hard to track down. 
 
Here's the core scenario - web app set to use SSL with various calendar lists sync'd to Outlook.
 
Everything was working as expected.  Then suddenly it all stopped working.  Outlook would report a generic HTTP 0 error.  New attempts to connect the lists to Outlook would also fail.
 
I went through a variety of diagnosis steps and nothing was popping up.  The site was operational, the certificates were valid, nothing had changed from client to server... tried to see if there was a difference between Outlook 2007 and 2010.  It was all the same generic error.
 
Coincidentally, I wanted to set that problem aside and fix another issue.  I happened to open up SPD and noticed that it threw up a dialog about not being able to validate the CRL for the certificate that was associated with the site.
 
Bingo!  A clue.
 
Sure enough, the CRL had expired.
 
On updating and publishing the CRL, everything started working again.
 
Net net: stssync will fail quietly if the CRL from the CA has expired. The user is not notified and requests are terminated.
 
Don't forget to double check the expiration of the CRL!
Posted @ 7:55 AM on Saturday, March 06, 2010 | Comments:
Posted by Maurice Prather

Nearly two weeks ago, several different things came together that helped lead me in a new and exciting direction in my professional life.  I've stepped down as the chief architect at ShareSquared and will be starting my own company.

 

Over the past few years, it seems that I've been slowly but surely working with smaller and smaller companies so that I can learn the ins/outs of running a business (Boeing -> Microsoft -> ShareSquared).  My three year run as the Lead Architect at ShareSquared has provided me with good insight and confidence.  Starting with a technical team of 1 person (me) back in March of 2007, I was able to help the company expand its technical staff up to 8 people. 

 

Having been a part of a company building experience and with the encouragement of family and friends, the time seemed right to invest my efforts into something that I could call my own.

 

Although there are still some formal legalities to get out of the way, the plan is pretty simple ... start a goat renting business.

 

Oh wait… I don't have any goats and it seems that I'm already too late (here's a YouTube video of a local commercial).  And for the record, I've seen their work first hand... what a neat way to cut down vegetation.

 

Seriously, though, I will continue to work with that little thing called SharePoint.  It's been fun and will continue to be so with the imminent arrival of SharePoint 2010.  I look forward to working with various friends as the company grows.

 

With a new direction, comes plans and a commitment to reinvigorate my blog and the site.  Over the coming weeks, expect a complete makeover. The whole website is a carry over/migration from a WSS 2003 site that I threw up one weekend back in spring of 2004.  It's time to change over to new structures and a new look while parsing out some of the old code offerings that haven't been touched in quite some time.

 

I'm even going to join this new micro-blogging thing called Twitter.  Yup, weirder things have happened ... but who knew you'd be able to know me as @mauriceprather.

 

Looking forward to the next adventure!

-Maurice

Posted @ 12:14 PM on Friday, February 26, 2010 | Comments:
Posted by Maurice Prather
One of the nicest new web part framework features in SharePoint 2010 is Web Part versioning.
 
Remember all those times you've edited a page only to misconfigure or delete a web part?  Versioning may help you unwind your mistakes, but it depends on how you are making edits.
 
How does it work?
  • Web Part instances are versioned only when a page is checked in.
  • Only Shared instances are versioned
  • Versioning is controlled by the document-level settings.

If you are editing in any of the following conditions, versioning will not occur:

  1. Editing Personalized or Personal Web Parts
  2. Editing a page that is not checked out

Under these conditions, edits occur as they always have... directly and w/o opportunity to fall back to a saved state.

As you can see Web Part versioning is really targeted toward protecting the broadest, most common usage scenarios.  If you are not checking in/out, you'll never see Web Part versioning at work.  Likewise, if you are dealing with anything other than a Shared Web Part, versioning does not occur.

What are the developer ramifications?
In it's simplicity, there nothing that you as a developer can really do.  The web part instances will either be on the page or they will not.

There is no visibility into a Web Part's history or opportunities for a Web Part to control its own destiny.  Web Part versioning is directly tied to the page history. 

The only side effect of versioning that I can foresee is the very same issue that people have with document version histories.  Each version is a complete instance/copy.  Therefore, if you are storing large amounts of data in a web part property, be aware that versioning will automatically force the user to consume more of their storage allocation.

In short, Web Part versioning is available and is really designed to be transparent to the developer and the end user.  The parts that are instantiated are completely dependent on the page version that is being rendered.

-Maurice

Posted @ 9:32 AM on Friday, October 30, 2009 | Comments:
Posted by Maurice Prather
Are you the type of person that has ever wondered which running back has the most yards per carry on natural fields when it's raining and the wind is in their face?
 
Well, a few years ago I had an opportunity to watch, from the sidelines, as a long time friend of mine (Rob Collie) generated wicked stats like that day in day out.  His team built an Excel Services application for a now-defunct fantasy football project over in MSN. They were looking at data in all sorts of ways...
 
The beauty of it all?  It's that little thing called BI.  You can take that first sentence of mine, remove football references, add your business elements... and it's practically the same concept - looking at your data in new and exciting ways.
 
BI in 2010 is pretty amazing.  There have been a lot of improvements that will make it much easier for more people to explore their worlds.  Gemini ... and yes, I'm still having a hard time getting used to the new name ... PowerPivot will change how businesses look at their data.
 
Want to learn more about PowerPivot?
I invite you to check out Rob Collie's blog at PowerPivotPro.com.  He's one of the folks that worked on Gemini... and he's an avid football stats man... the combo is dangerous if you're in his fantasy football league ... expect his blog to be packed with some informative articles!
 
 
-Maurice
 
Posted @ 7:20 PM on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 | Comments:

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