Part 1 TE RI AL Preparing for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 CO PY RI GH TE D MA Chapter 1: SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Chapter 2: Installation Standalone Chapter 3: Complete Installation
Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood SharePoint Foundation (SPF) is a nifty web-based collaboration, data management, communication, idea-creating, problem-solving tool that costs you nothing (assuming you already have a licensed server). SharePoint Foundation 2010 needs to run on Windows Server 2008 (Standard Service Pack 2 or higher).
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood This chapter will give you an idea of what you need to know to prepare for installing SharePoint Foundation. This kind of product does require planning. This isn’t an “install it and then think about what you want to do with it later” kind of product. To make sure the initial installation and configuration of your SharePoint implementation goes smoothly, it is a good idea to know what you are going to need for success before you start.
Software Requirements DVD Drive This is not really required for SharePoint but is useful. Display Microsoft avoids mentioning a recommended resolution. I’ve found 1024×768 on the client is a functional minimum. Pages don’t display well at lower resolutions. To avoid any scroll bars, many pages in SharePoint are now better viewed at resolutions closer to 1152× 864 or higher. Network Microsoft, again, doesn’t mention a real requirement here. But I find that 1 Gbps is a good recommendation.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Web Server and Application Server Roles For Server 2008, IIS 7.0, or 2008 R2, IIS 7.5, with IIS 6.0 compatibility must be installed. This makes sense. SharePoint is web-based because IIS allows Windows Server (2008 or higher) to host websites and service HTTP requests from clients. Many SharePoint capabilities are dependent upon and colored by the functions and needs of IIS. For example, IIS contains Web Sites, which hold web pages.
Software Requirements It’s important to realize how pivotal SQL is to SharePoint. In addition to hosting niftylooking websites, SharePoint’s real primary purpose is to store and access data from its databases. SharePoint is really an extensive database front end. It’s all about lists (and a special kind of list called a library, discussed in Chapter 8, “Introduction to Libraries”). Lists contain data in records and fields (or, visually, rows and columns).
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Figure 1.1 The SharePoint Foundation installation screen Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime v1.0 (x64): This improves SharePoint’s ability to synchronize data with ADO.NET-enabled data sources or FeedSync feeds (such as RSS or Atom). Microsoft Chart Controls for the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Installs new assemblies for ASP.NET and Windows Form Chart Controls. It’s particularly useful for visualization with Visual Studio.
Software Requirements SharePoint installed on the same server, and want to use Report Builder (or another tool) to make reports that can be stored in (and read from) a SharePoint library. Of course, from the client side, users will need a browser to access the SharePoint sites. Browser support comes in two levels. Level 1 describes browsers that are fully supported, and SharePoint is considered optimized for their access.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Figure 1.2 SharePoint Foundation installation types Server Farm, Stand-alone This installation is essentially the same as the Standalone install you get by just clicking the Standalone button. Use this installation method if you intend to install SharePoint on one server only (you cannot use it as a server farm server), and you want SharePoint to install and use the SQL Server 2008 Express database engine on the same server.
Software Requirements | installed on the same machine as you are installing SharePoint, SharePoint will not notice if you don’t specify that you want a Complete installation. That’s because Standalone and Server Farm Stand-alone install SQL Server 2008 Express without your involvement; they don’t give you a chance to specify anything.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood The differences between the kinds of SharePoint installations are not the stuff of rocket science. However, if you intend to do more than run everything on one server or if you don’t want to end up with the SQL Express database engine, you really need to understand those differences before you install SharePoint.
SharePoint Sites and Databases | Keep in mind that these are the web applications that are created during simple Standalone SharePoint installation. You can create more if you’d like. If you inherit a SharePoint server and find that more than three web applications are being used by SharePoint, that’s fine.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Extra Databases This version of SharePoint does come with some additional services that, when enabled and configured, require their own databases. Their default names are as follows: WSS_Logging This database is used by SharePoint’s diagnostic logging and usage to store logging and usage data. Bdc_Service_DB_(GUID) This is the database used by SharePoint to store Business Data Connectivity data.
SharePoint Service Accounts and Services SharePoint Service Accounts and Services After it installs, SharePoint creates and enables a number of services and application pools in order to work properly. To be able to do their jobs, these services need to run with some sort of account context. Some of those services do work only on the local machine and therefore can get away with using local accounts.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Local users and groups will be used to give users access to SharePoint in that scenario, rather than going through a domain controller. You can still support incoming email in that scenario by enabling SMTP in IIS and then setting it up in Central Administration. It just goes to show that SharePoint is scalable down as well as up.
SharePoint Service Accounts and Services database access account. However, each application pool does use server resources to function, so some organizations actually require there be a limited number of application pools for a SharePoint implementation. It can be a balancing act, but it’s something to keep in mind when planning accounts for SharePoint. Search Account This account should be a domain user. It directly accesses the Search database.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood With PowerShell, things are different. Maybe because the tool is so new or maybe because it has been more the focus of developers than administrators, PowerShell requires the accounts that use it to be very powerful, possibly insecurely powerful. For an account to use PowerShell, it must be a local administrator of the SharePoint server.
SharePoint Service Accounts and Services In my case, I plan to give my SharePoint admin account the right to be a shell admin for the whole farm in order to be able to use it, at will, to do work—making it my super-admin account (see Chapter 14 for more about how that’s done). Initially, we will be doing a lot of work either in Central Administration or with STSADM. Later in the book, as you get the hang of using SharePoint, we will begin to do more and more with PowerShell.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Bad Solution, No Dinner for You… Solutions can be pointed to the User Code service and, using something called solution affinity, be made to run only on the servers that have this service started. Any sandboxed solution (which now includes site templates) is allowed only so many “resource points” within which to run. If a solution exceeds its allowed points, it’s turned off.
SharePoint Service Accounts and Services | Central Administration and Web Application Both are services you’ll see in every SharePoint farm. The Central Administration service runs only on SharePoint servers that are hosting the Central Administration site. On most server farms, only one server needs to host that site. Web Application is the service that lets SharePoint have web applications, serve pages, and so on. It is fundamental to SharePoint, and every SharePoint server runs it.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Authentication Types In conjunction with IIS, SharePoint supports several ways to allow users to authenticate. They are not exclusive; you can apply multiple types of authentication to a web application. IIS will apply the most restrictive method first. If that fails, it will try the second most-restrictive method, and so on, until it finally refuses the client or lets them log in. ASP.
SharePoint Search | authentication process of Kerberos, using it to authenticate can be a problem due to time synchronization. Another consideration is that, in some situations, the Index service used by the Search service (discussed next) cannot authenticate using Kerberos (on custom ports in particular) and therefore cannot index sites that require it. That said, Kerberos can be a little faster and is more secure than NTLM.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Search has some strengths and weaknesses that you should know about before you install SharePoint: •u Search doesn’t have much of an administrative surface. The GUI settings are limited to what service accounts are used, the search database name, and how often the site collections will be indexed. Indexing is primarily incremental, but even that can strain resources if you do it too often.
SharePoint Search | will be scoped depending on where you initiate the search. If you are on a list or library, even though the search field will say “Search this site…,” it will actually only return results for that list or library.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Indexing and Gathering The Search service’s Index service is an old hand-me-down from SPS 2003 and MOSS. The Index service is a powerful feature that you don’t need to monitor. It takes care of itself and does its own thing. (SharePoint Server 2010 has extensive added configuration features for indexing.) Its only content sources are the content databases that SharePoint uses.
Managed Paths | Alternate Access Mapping When you initially install and start using SharePoint, accessing it by using the NetBIOS name of the server works fine, but what if you want your users to be able to access it the same way they do other Web sites or be able to access it from the Internet? You can’t resolve that server name among all the other machine names on the Internet, so you need it to resolve to a DNS name.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood additional site collections. The URL for that path would be, on the same server, http://spf2/ sites/. What this means is if you create that additional site collection, it can be something on that path, such as http://spf2/sites/something. You can, of course, create your own managed paths, depending on your required topology. This is useful if you are planning to have one web application, say, per region, and then site collections for each office.
Performance Planning | a member of the site collections in any way. This also works from the standpoint of denying a certain user or security group permission; so even if they are added to a site collection within a web application, they will not be able to make use of the denied permissions. Keep this in mind as you plan for user accounts and permissions while designing for your web applications and site collections. For more on users and permissions, see Chapter 12.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood To show you what I mean and illustrate that the suggested hardware requirements are probably adequate for your needs, assume your office has 1,000 people who are going to use SharePoint, and 60 percent of them will be actively using SharePoint daily. You estimate that each user probably performs about 50 operations a day. (Most of them will spend more time editing a document than retrieving it from the document library or uploading it.
Storage Planning | often than not. That’s why you need to monitor how your SharePoint server handles the stress of use, just in case. If you can afford it, consider calculating your OPS requirements and then doubling them to prepare for the inevitable, large increase in use. Additional Performance Considerations You’ll want to keep an eye on these items that will increase your processor’s load: Alerts Users can set alerts on changes in a list or library.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood content databases, which holds all SharePoint’s precious content—are stored on a different SQL server, planning for storage is still important. Consider that the maximum default size allowed for document uploads is 50 MB. A large multimedia Word document can often about 5 MB, so a maximum of 50 MB is usually more than sufficient. Of course, you can adjust the size; this is just a good default.
Storage Planning | limit for each document, then that would be no more than 20 MB of indexed entries per document and therefore (going with our scenario) about 400 MB stored in the search database for that one document library. When you’re deciding how much storage space your SharePoint server should use in SQL, consider this: •u You need to have an idea of what your users are going to do. Estimate how many documents they are going to be collaborating on and storing.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood So the formula would be as follows: ((200 x 7) × 10240KB) + (10KB × (600 + (7 × 200)) or 14, 336,000 + 20,000 = 14,365,000KB 14,356,000KB is about 13.6909 GB (rounded up to 14) This averages to a storage size of about 14 GB (estimating high of course) per year. Then you need to factor in the storage space that Search will need (about 40 percent of the size of stored files, or in the case of 14 GB, factor in an additional 5.6 GB).
Software Limitations | Table 1.1 contains the software boundaries for this version of SharePoint. Table 1.1: Software boundaries for SharePoint Foundation 2010 Object Maximum value Type of object Details Zone 5 per web application Web application limit This limit is hard-coded per web application as Default, Intranet, Internet, Extranet, and Custom.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Table 1.2: Software thresholds for SharePoint Foundation 2010 (continued) Object Maximum value Type of object limit Details List View 5,000 items Lists and libraries limit The default maximum number of items that a query can process at one time. Can be changed in Resource Throttling per web application.
Software Limitations Table 1.2: Software thresholds for SharePoint Foundation 2010 (continued) Object Maximum value Type of object limit Details Date and Time 48 per list Column limit Lookup 96 per list Column limit Yes/No 96 per list Column limit Person or Group 96 per list Column limit Hyperlink or Picture 138 Column limit Calculated 48 Column limit Web Parts 25 per wiki or web part page Page limit This is an estimate based on simple web parts.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Table 1.3: Software limitations for SharePoint Foundation 2010 Object Maximum value Type of object limit Details Content Database 300 per web application Web application limit With 300 content databases per web application, end users may not see a change in performance, but administrative operations such as creating a new site collection will experience a decrease in performance. Using PowerShell for administration might help.
Software Limitations Table 1.3: Software limitations for SharePoint Foundation 2010 (continued) Object Maximum value Type of object limit Details Major Versions 400,000 List and library limit Passing this limit can have surprising performance effects, causing issues with file open, save, delete, and view history. Items 30,000,000 per list List and library limit You can create very large lists using standard views that filter by metadata and by using folders.
| Chapter 1 SharePoint Foundation 2010 Under the Hood Table 1.3: Software limitations for SharePoint Foundation 2010 (continued) Object Maximum value Type of object limit Details SharePoint Search Service Applications 20 per farm Search limit Multiple servers can run Search. More than 20 (particularly if there are other service applications running on the farm) degrades performance.
The Bottom Line Identify the three ways of installing SharePoint Foundation Choose the best three ways of installing SharePoint Foundation for you. With SharePoint, how you choose to install it defines how it works. Making the wrong choice can come back to haunt you. Know what you’re in for, and choose the correct installation type for your business.
