February 4th, 2011
by Tristan Watkins
I finally tested the SharePoint Server 2010 December 2010 CU package over the last couple of nights. The good news is that it actually worked (I’ve had trouble with August and October) and it has a load of fixes, particularly for the User Profile Service Application. The bad news is that it’s known to require restarting the User Profile Synchronisation Service after it completes. In my tests, I also had to temporarily re-add the Farm account as Local Admin and reboot before re-starting the service, after running the installer and the Products Configuration Wizard. It failed when I just tried to temporarily add the Farm account as local admin and log off/on again, so the reboot before re-starting the service is likely to be necessary.
UPDATE 19/2/2011: I got a comment from Spencer Harbar today (below) noting that restarting the SPTimer service is sufficient after temporarily adding the farm account as local admin. The reboot isn’t necessary to acquire the new rights although in my test I did need to reboot after running the installer.
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IT Management, SharePoint | 
4 Comments »
December 6th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
I’ve recently been involved in a somewhat unusual client engagement, in that I was designing and delivering the infrastructure without knowing the shape of the IA or solution architecture. Obviously, this imposed some restrictions on what we could define, but it also meant that I had to handle some aspects of the engagement that would normally be taken care of by other colleagues. To that end, I suppose some of these considerations aren’t purely infrastructure-specific, but they could be in an engagement like this one and they’re things that infrastructure people should understand. Hopefully it’ll be useful for solutions people as well.
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Client applications, Consultancy and Design, Performance, Security, SharePoint | No Comments »
December 2nd, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
Drum roll please! At long last, I bring you the results of a great deal of testing. Here’s the background:
I’ve said my preamble in those posts, so I’ll cut to the chase here.
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Hardware, Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 6 Comments »
December 1st, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
As I indicated in my last post, I’ve been plundering the depths of SharePoint development productivity in recent months. Understanding the context established in that post is pretty essential to understanding what follows here. In a nutshell, I’m trying to improve system performance for current users of our SharePoint development environment. This is not as simple as examining the Windows Experience Index on a number of laptop models. I needed to consult with our users to identify which tasks are slow for them and devise tests that would allow me to measure system performance on different physical and virtual systems. In this post I will describe the systems, the tests and the testing process before reviewing the results.
The Tests
The 21 tests that we settled on were the result of discussions with a number of the core developers, consultants and architects at Content and Code, plus a few tests that I threw in to confirm/disconfirm some of my suppositions, such as the impact of the User Profile Service Connection on first page load time. All 21 tests were run three times for each permutation of hardware candidate and virtualisation technology. We also tested on Amazon EC2. I will discuss the testing process in more detail in a moment.
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Hardware, Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 3 Comments »
November 30th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
In the near future, I’ll be discussing the results of the SharePoint Development productivity testing that I’ve been working on for some time. A key part of the background to that story is a choice to virtualise SharePoint, and within that, a choice of virtualisation technology. In this post I’ll be reviewing the problem in advance of a more detailed discussion of the productivity gains and losses with some of these technologies/approaches.
For clarity, I will quickly state the problem as I see it. SharePoint 2010 system requirements and practitioner mobility requirements are inherently at odds. What guidance exists for this unique problem space tends to regurgitate preferences/allegiances rather than comparing technologies and ratifying assumptions with real-world tests. At best, you get system performance indices for a single laptop model, but these results may vary when any hardware component is changed.
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Performance, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 10 Comments »
November 29th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
In the previous posts in this series I’ve discussed the AWS platform and took a closer look at storage, snapshots and provisioning, looked at networking and cloning and then reviewed administration, delegation and licensing. In this post I will analyse cost, which is probably the most important factor when considering a move to the cloud.
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Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Windows | 10 Comments »
November 26th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
In the first part of this series on SharePoint 2010 infrastructure considerations for Amazon EC2, I introduced the AWS platform and took a closer look at storage, snapshots and provisioning. In the second post I moved on to networking and cloning. In this third post I will discuss administration, delegation and licensing.
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Consultancy and Design, Networking, SharePoint, Windows | 5 Comments »
November 25th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
In my previous post I introduced some of the peculiarities of designing SharePoint 2010 environments for Amazon’s EC2, specifically focused on the AWS platform, storage, snapshots and provisioning. In this post I continue this exploration, moving on to cloning and networking considerations.
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Consultancy and Design, Networking, SharePoint, Windows | 7 Comments »
November 24th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) have been around for a while now but there’s been surprisingly little use or abuse in the SharePoint community, from what I’ve seen. A notable exception to this is Andrew Woodward’s novel and interesting approach to Exchange BPOS migration via Amazon EC2. But that doesn’t talk much about SharePoint on Amazon, so in these posts I’ll give an introduction to the design constraints that pertain to SharePoint 2010 development environments on EC2. Even if the Amazon Web Services aren’t appealing, a lot of the issues discussed here will apply to consumption of other Pay-As-You-Go infrastructure services, presumably including the forthcoming Windows Azure VM role AKA Hyper-V Cloud. In this first post I focus on the platform, storage, snapshots and provisioning.
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Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Windows | 7 Comments »
November 4th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
I’m presently running some quite methodical SharePoint 2010 development environment performance tests, as we’re finding that the Dell XPS M1330 we’ve been using for the last few years doesn’t really cut it in some scenarios. This has been an on-going issue for some time where I work, but it’s only recently been prioritised at the top of my workload. That it is now my top priority should give some indication how important these issues are for any company that spends significant time customising SharePoint. I’ll be discussing this wider project in more detail once I’ve finished my testing in the next couple of weeks, but for now I wanted to share a provisional finding about connecting Web Applications to the User Profile Service Application.
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Client applications, Performance, SharePoint | 4 Comments »
