share point ha and dr
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SharePoint Alphabet Soup – HA and DR
Greg Kamer
Greg Kamer – The Mirazon Group MCSE:2003, MCTS: MOSS 2007, WSS 3.0 5 Years in IT
◦ 3 with SharePoint Twitter: @gregkamer Email: [email protected]
About Me
High Availability◦ Simply, keeping a system up as long as possible
without interruption.◦ Redundancy is key here.◦ Tends to be more costly, but when weighed with
mission critical apps, the costs may be easily justified.
Some Definitions
Disaster Recovery◦ How can we recover, in terms of money, speed
and manpower, a system that has been brought down.
◦ Factors can be as small as someone tripping over a network cable and yanking it out to a large scale natural disaster.
◦ Costs range from small to VERY high.
Definitions (cont’d)
Considerations must be made for the roles at hand (WFE, Excel, Indexer, Query, etc)
Clustering v Load Balancing◦ No roles in SharePoint can be clustered, with the
exception of the database “role”◦ Some roles will self-load balance◦ Discussion
High Availability in SP
Web Front Ends are special They must be load balanced to make them
highly available This is where SharePoint and the user(s)
directly meet
http://geekswithblogs.net/emanish/archive/2007/05/22/112682.aspx
WFEs and Load Balancing
Network Load Balancing – Microsoft◦ Free, but limited in functionality◦ Inclusive walkthrough - http://tinyurl.com/mgs566
Virtual Appliances◦ Some free, some paid. Your mileage may vary.
Hardware◦ F5, CoyotePoint, Cisco◦ Awesome features but pricey
Load Balancing WFEs
When this is setup in SharePoint, you MUST specify a conversion load balancer.
There are no configuration settings once the service is in place.
Document Conversion
Multiple ECS Servers can be used. There is configuration and options, but they
are few.
Excel Calculation Services
Once a workbook is opened, the book uses the same server throughout the duration.
For further study: http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2008/12/12/excel-services-and-load-balancing.aspx
ECS Cont’d
This role cannot be made highly available.
There are ways to make it somewhat highly available, but it is not an automatic process and can tax resources.
Index
The role can run on a WFE or on separate servers
The roles are made redundant by using multiple WFEs
If not on dedicated WFEs, then round robin is used to serve queries
Beware the dreaded “My query role runs on the index server, but he has no friends cause he doesn’t know how to share” scenario.
Query Role
SQL Clustering – very highly available, but requires shared storage (SAN)
SQL Mirroring – not automatic failover for SharePoint, nor really high availability, but can be scripted for more-highly-available-than-not scenario
Database
Can provide instant HA in some circumstances
Most any role can be virtualized *with exceptions of course*
DR can be factored in here as well.
Virtualization
We all have a plan and we have all tested it, right? Right???
SharePoint has many facets with respect to DR. SQL, Server 2008, hardware and connectivity, etc
Disaster Recovery
How do we look at SharePoint in terms of DR?
SQL? Virtualization? Redundancy? Network Connectivity? Backup and restore procedures? Hot/warm/cold recovery sites?
Brainstorm
CRUCIAL to any DR discussion. If you have no backups, you have no disaster recoverability.
Restore time and SLAs will determine the type of backups that may be required.
Backups
Are available via the GUI (Operations -> Backup)◦ Are really just database dumps◦ Important for Enterprise search-gets index file and
DB at the same time◦ Not able to be scheduled!
STSADM –o backup◦ Able to be made a scheduled task◦ Can cause table locking issues on DB◦ Not good for large site collections
Third party (AvePoint, Idera, DPM, etc)
Backups
SharePoint native backups not able to restore individual sites, lists, or items (without a lot of hassle!)
Third party tools must be used for that SPD can backup sites…but not the cleanest
way to do it. Recycle Bin – Can save your bacon!
Backups Cont’d
Creating a mirror farm.◦ Database mirroring or log shipping◦ Backup and restores
Third party mirroring tools◦ AvePoint DocAve High Availability -
http://www.avepoint.com/sharepoint-high-availability-docave/
Other DR considerations
Plan for Redundancy – MSFT Whitepaper http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263044.aspx
Case Study of High Availability for SharePoint Server by Using Virtualized Environments and Database Mirroring – MSFT Whitepaper http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee335343.aspx
SharePoint Disaster Recovery Guide By John Ferringer and Sean McDonough http://www.amazon.com/SharePoint-2007-Disaster-Recovery-Guide/dp/1584505990/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250795045&sr=8-1
Further Reading
SharePoint Backup and Disaster Recovery – Joel Oleson TechEd 2008 PPT http://www.slideshare.net/joeloleson/sharepoint-backup-and-disaster-recovery-presentation
Differences between Log Shipping and Mirroring http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewat/archive/2007/07/28/database-mirroring-and-log-shipping-which-is-better.aspx
More Reading
Q&A
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Don’t be afraid to play, it’s a resilient platform.
Thank you!