Tristan Watkins on IT Infrastructure
Technical guidance for Microsoft security technologies, Windows, SharePoint, and other generally useful findings
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.
Continue reading “SharePoint 2010 Development Environment Performance Test Results”
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 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.
Continue reading “SharePoint 2010 Development Environment Performance Tests”
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.
Continue reading “SharePoint Development Productivity and Virtualisation Technologies”
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”
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.
Continue reading “User Profile Service Connection and Slow First Page Load”
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?