Tag: EC2

Amazon VPC and VM Import Updates

In the last couple of weeks I’ve received notification of two important updates regarding Amazon Web Services. I thought I’d share them here, as they are both relevant to use of SharePoint 2010 on EC2 and I’ve seen no mention of them elsewhere. If you’re interested in this broader topic, I’ve covered it in detail here:

 

My commentary here assumes some familiarity with these earlier posts. This is new functionality that enables new design options. These options should make SharePoint 2010 on EC2 more appealing for a few specific uses.

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SharePoint 2010 Development Environment Performance Test Results

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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SharePoint 2010 Development Environment Performance Tests

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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SharePoint Development Productivity and Virtualisation Technologies

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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SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure for Amazon EC2 Part IV: Cost Analysis

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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SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure for Amazon EC2 Part III: Administration, Delegation and Licensing

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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SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure for Amazon EC2 Part II: Cloning and Networking

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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SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure for Amazon EC2 Part I: Storage and Provisioning

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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