Meeting Your SLAs
Dan Holme (MVP, SharePoint Server)
Chief SharePoint Evangelist
AvePoint

Dan Holme
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Chief SharePoint Evangelist – AvePoint
Based in Maui, Hawaii
5-year MVP
Microsoft Technologies Consultant, NBC Olympics
Speaker: SPC, TechEd, Connections
Columnist: SharePoint Pro magazine
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Author: SharePoint 2010 Training Kit
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 dan.holme@avepoint.com
@danholme

AGENDA
SharePoint Components
SLA Alphabet Soup
Backup and Restore Toolset
Backup and Recovery Scopes & Scenarios
High Availability
Best Practice Summary

SHAREPOINT COMPONENTS
SLA Alphabet Soup
Backup and Restore Toolset
Backup and Recovery Scopes & Scenarios
High Availability
Best Practice Summary

SharePoint
Zone
Sub site
Farm
Web Application
Content DB
Site collection
Top-level site
List/Library
[Folder]
Item / Document
IIS, Windows services, file system, …
Service Application
SQL Server workflows security metadata versions

SharePoint Components
SLA ALPHABET SOUP
Backup and Restore Toolset
Backup and Recovery Scopes & Scenarios
High Availability
Best Practice Summary

Service level agreements
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RTO – Recovery Time Objective
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RPO – Recovery Point Objective
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RLO – Recovery Level Objective
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Uptime

SharePoint Components
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SharePoint databases
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Recreated during restore to a rebuilt farm
Often excluded from backup:
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IIS configuration
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File system components

Visualizing RTO & RPO
Backup Window
RTO
Backed-up Failure
RPO
Recovered

Recovery Level Objective
Farm
Zone Web Application
Sub site
Content DB
Site collection
Top-level site
List/Library
[Folder]
Item / Document
IIS, Windows services, file system, …
Service Application
SQL Server workflows security metadata versions

SharePoint Components
SLA Alphabet Soup
BACKUP AND RESTORE TOOLSET
Backup and Recovery Scopes & Scenarios
High Availability
Best Practice Summary

Backup and recovery toolset
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Recycle Bin
SharePoint Central Administration backup and restore
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PowerShell
STSADM
IISBack.vbs
SQL Server tools and maintenance plans
Third-party

SharePoint Components
SLA Alphabet Soup
Backup and Restore Toolset
BACKUP AND RECOVERY SCOPES & SCENARIOS
High Availability
Best Practice Summary

List/website export
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Granularity
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Lowest level of out-of-box granularity
Not full fidelity
Slowest of all backup types
Recommend < 1GB
Sub site
Top-level site
List/Library

Site collection backup
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Full fidelity
Faster than export
Read-only during backup
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Recommend < 15GB
Sub site
Site collection
Top-level site
List/Library
[Folder]
Item / Document

Farm backup
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Two forms
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Full fidelity
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Configuration
Data
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Fastest backup type
Full or differential

Farm backup ≠ complete backup
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Bits on each server in the farm
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Services state: which services are running on which servers
Service application associations
Managed account passwords

Other considerations
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No item level restore
No scheduling engine
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Can only backup directly to UNC path
XML catalog
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No way to archive backup sets
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Recovery can be time consuming

Farm recovery
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Scenario: farm has failed
Solution: rebuild farm
Create a new farm
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Use Central Administration to restore farm
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Apply manual changes to each server
Reconfigure services on each server
Reconfigure service application associations
Test!!

Content container recovery
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Scenario: restore a list or library, website, site collection
Solution: unattached content database recovery
Key benefit: no need for a recovery farm
Three primary steps
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Site collection backup
Exported site or list
Unattached content database
Key drawback: must restore a content database

Deleted content recovery
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Scenario: User has deleted content
Solution: Recycle Bin
First-stage (end user)
Second-stage (site collection administrator)
Site Recycle Bin
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Deleted sites are kept in the second stage (site collection) recycle bin
Site collection admin can restore in UI or PowerShell can be used
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PowerShell (Get-SPDeletedSite, Restore-SPDeletedSite)
New in
SP1

Do you need a third-party solution?
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Do any of the following apply?
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Bottom line

Recovery scenarios not supported out-of-box
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Granular (item/document or folder) content recovery
Platform recovery

SharePoint Components
SLA Alphabet Soup
Backup and Restore Toolset
Backup and Recovery Scopes & Scenarios
HIGH AVAILABILITY
Best Practice Summary

Service uptime
Uptime Percentage
95% Uptime
99% (2 nines)
99.9% (3 nines)
99.99% (4 nines)
99.999% (5 nines)
Downtime per year
18.25 days
3.65 days
8.77 hours
52.60 minutes
5.26 minutes
High availability comes at a very steep price
95% 5 nines

SharePoint’s server roles
Web front end
App server
DB server

To achieve high availability
Web front end
App server
DB server
You must add redundancy for each role

Web front end
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Use load balancing
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Active/active design gives faster performance and fault tolerance http://intranet
Load balancer

WFE guidance
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Use hardware load balancer for best performance & flexibility
Run Central Administration on multiple servers
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Each server should be identical (hardware & software)
Virtualization is fully supported
For larger farms, do not run application services on WFE servers
Optimize application pools for performance and isolation

Application server
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Use Central Admin to configure services on server
Active/active design – load balancing built into SharePoint
Very flexible
Metadata Mgmt Services
User Profile Services
Business Data Connectivity
Office Web Apps
…
Metadata Mgmt Services
User Profile Services
Business Data Connectivity
Office Web Apps
…
Query
Crawl
Query
Crawl

Application server guidance
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Do not use the farm configuration wizard
Group services and deploy these as a unit to other servers
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Create service applications for only those services needed
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Virtualization is fully supported
Use cross-farm services where needed

Search services
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Search services are configured within a search service application
Index can be divided up into index partitions
A crawl component is a server process that crawls content to create index
A query component is a server process that consults index to generate search results
Crawler Crawler Index partition 1
Query component
Index partition 1
Query component mirror

Database server
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To scale, SharePoint supports multiple database servers
To improve fault tolerance, two primary options
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Both are active/passive designs
Primary
Active
Clustering
Passive
Mirroring
Failover

To cluster or mirror?
Protection level
Require shared storage
Protect all databases
Setup ease
Configuration flexibility
Failover ease
Failover speed
Cost
Server location
Cluster
Server
Yes
Yes
Hard
Inflexible
Easy
Fast
Expensive
Side by side
In SharePoint farms, database mirroring is more commonly implemented
Mirror
Database
No
No
Easier
More flexible
Harder
Slower
Cheaper
Can be separated

Database server guidance
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Do not run non-SQL apps on database server
Dedicate server to one SharePoint farm
Use SAN for all database storage
Configure disks as RAID 10 for tempdb, content & search databases
Backup log files regularly
In general, keep content databases limited to 200GB
If using RBS, be sure to consider recovery aspects

SharePoint Components
SLA Alphabet Soup
Backup and Restore Toolset
Backup and Recovery Scopes & Scenarios
High Availability
BEST PRACTICE SUMMARY

Best practices
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Define recovery objectives
Document environment and keep a change log
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Use solution packages (WSP) for custom code deployments
Keep DBs small - DB size often dictates RTO
Have a test/QA/staging farm
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Consider third-party solutions
Perform trial restores

Resources
 TechNet
 technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748824.aspx
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 technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662536.aspx
Architecting a fault tolerant farm (Michael Noel)
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Optimizing SQL Server for SharePoint (Randy Williams)
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Speeding up SharePoint recovery (Randy Williams)
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SharePoint 2010 Disaster recovery (Todd Klindt)