Tristan Watkins on IT Infrastructure
Technical guidance for Microsoft security technologies, Windows, SharePoint, and other generally useful findings
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.
Continue reading “SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure for Amazon EC2 Part IV: Cost Analysis”
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.
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.
Continue reading “SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure for Amazon EC2 Part II: Cloning and Networking”
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.
Continue reading “SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure for Amazon EC2 Part I: Storage and Provisioning”
A couple of weeks ago I posted information about a Fix For Bit Rate Throttling W3WP Crashes in SharePoint 2010. A few hours ago, Jack Freelander from IIS.NET announced that IIS Media Services 4.0 has been released, including this fix. This is just a quick post to update that the fix has passed Beta, in case anyone was waiting on the final release before diving in.
I still have yet to find the time to test this myself, but I’d be very keen to hear about your experiences – good or bad. Failing that, I hope to get back to this in the next couple of weeks.
Over the Summer, we dove deep in to SharePoint 2010 for WCM when we re-launched our corporate website. As I mentioned the other day, I spent a decent amount of time looking at caching and some of the new supporting technologies, like Bit Rate Throttling, an IIS.NET extension to IIS 7.x – part of the IIS Media Services 3.0. package that also includes Smooth Streaming. Bit Rate Throttling is like when you watch a YouTube clip and it only buffers a short time in advance of what you’re watching, also known as Progressive Download. In Microsoft’s words, Bit Rate Throttling is…
“…an IIS 7.0 extension that meters the download speeds of media file types and data between a server and a client computer. The encoded bit rates of media file types such as Windows Media Video (WMV), MPEG-4 (MP4), and Adobe Flash Video, are automatically detected, and the rate at which those files are delivered to the client over HTTP are controlled according to the Bit Rate Throttling configuration.”
It basically saves you bandwidth by only transferring what you’ve watched plus a small, configurable buffer. Think about each user that starts watching a ten minute video but only watches one minute. In that time, they may have downloaded five minutes of content – quadrupling the bandwidth consumption unnecessarily. Bit Rate Throttling shares some user experience characteristics with Streaming Media, but it works on a normal web server over HTTP. It’s really quite a simple tool and I won’t devote space here to explaining it when the IIS.NET site already has some great content, including a brief introductory video. Definitely check it out.
So why am I writing about it?
For some time now, IT professionals have been modifying DCOM activation rights in order to keep their System event logs clean. In SharePoint 2010, that fix became slightly trickier, as permissions to modify the DCOM permissions had to be granted through the registry for the IIS WAM REG admin service and oSearch14 DCOM applications. Having made these fixes, I’ve noticed a new breed of DCOM 10016 error.
The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
and APPID
{000C101C-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
to the user <FARM ACCOUNT> SID (S-1-5-21-xxxxxxx….) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.
The CLSID for this COM Server Application is MSIServer, used to activate the Windows Installer Service. You can find this by navigating to HKCRAppId and examining the details there:
Continue reading “Product Version Job: DCOM 10016 strikes again”
Recently we’ve been considering a hardware refresh for our developer/consultant/architect laptop build (on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard with Hyper-V). After a fair amount of deliberation we decided to pilot a new model but stumbled massively at the first hurdle: when we enabled the Hyper-V role on a new Dell Latitude E6410 we got a blue screen. Further testing revealed that the graphics driver was at fault and the SVGA driver worked fine. However, the SVGA driver only has single monitor support. Back to the drawing board.
Continue reading “Hyper-V video issues fixed by Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta?”
I’ve just finished watching Virtual PC Guy’s TechEd video on the forthcoming Dynamic Memory update for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. The beta release of the service pack is due in July. The video is fairly lengthy, at around 80 minutes, but is well worth a watch if you’re interested and find the time. If not, here’s a round-up: Continue reading “Dynamic Memory for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1”
With SharePoint 2010 RTM looming, I’ve stumbled across an architectural change that may surprise some people – namely, that SharePoint 2010 no longer supports multiple-server farms without a domain infrastructure. In SharePoint 2007 it was possible to create SharePoint farms in a Workgroup, so long as all of the user accounts for the services and application pool identities were named the same and had the same password. You could even manage users with an Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) or Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) LDAP directory (albeit with some fairly limiting restrictions). However, it was possible to use these farms for testing or when an Active Directory infrastructure was undesirable (as some people see it in a DMZ). Now, it is still possible to do a Simple installation on a single server without full domain services, but it is no longer supported on multiple servers, and the Simple installation comes with its own planning considerations, to which I’ll return in a bit. First, there’s another wrinkle regarding the single server Complete installation.