Tag: SharePoint 2010

The definitive word on Hyper-V high-end graphics performance

The Microsoft virtualisation team are certainly taking community engagement and transparency seriously these days. I’m happy to report that Ben Armstrong (Virtual PC Guy) has posted the definitive summary of Hyper-V high-end graphics performance issues. He was the first person to discover the issue and has produced most of the guidance on it since. Key things to note:
  • It’s not an issue on processors with SLAT, but these are only just hitting the market in laptops in the near future
  • It’s not an issue with the SVGA driver
    • I’ve asked if the SVGA driver might ever offer multi-monitor support. He’s looking in to it. This might be a great compromise until processors with SLAT become ubiquitous
  • This same problem occurs in all native Hypervisors
    • Virtual PC and VMWare Workstation do not have the same problem but they are Type 2 hypervisors and do not offer the same performance as Hyper-V

So… there’s still no conclusive solution but it’s good to have the full context of the problem. For more background on why this matters for SharePoint see my previous post on the matter.

Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part IV: Automated deployment

In the first three parts of this series I covered the project objectives and the system design, then turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build. In this section I will look at automating deployment of that host operating system. This is lengthy, but there’s a lot to cover.

Continue reading “Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment — Part IV: Automated deployment”

Troubleshooting SharePoint 2010 and ULS log changes

SharePoint 2010 ULS logging adds a very useful new column called the Correlation ID. The ID tracks a request and greatly simplifies finding detailed error logging in SharePoint trace logs. Additionally, Mattias Karlson points out that there’s a new CodePlex project called ULSViewer which parses SharePoint 2010 logs in a friendly view.

The correlation ID in a SharePoint 2010 error message:

111109_1301_Troubleshoo1

The Trace logs in ULS Viewer, filtered by the Correlation ID:

111109_1301_Troubleshoo2

NewSID myth implications for SharePoint development

It’s now a week on from Mark Russinovich’s NewSID retirement announcement and I’ve been watching the feedback since. To give a brief overview, it’s long been a tenant of machine cloning processes that a new machine SID should be generated for each clone in order to prevent  conflicts. Mark Russinovich wrote the original NewSID tool for Windows NT and as a Microsoft Technical Fellow today, he supposed that it might not be needed anymore and investigated the implications of retiring it. Obviously, if you haven’t read it yet and you work with machine cloning, you should read the article, but if you haven’t found the time to sift through the 168 comments (and counting), this summary might help clarify things:

Continue reading “NewSID myth implications for SharePoint development”

DCOM IIS WAMREG error 10016 with SharePoint 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2

Taking a quick break from the SharePoint development series (I hope to finish part IV tonight), Matt Groves has a fix for a slightly more perturbing version of the DCOM IIS WAMREG 10016 error with SharePoint 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2. His fix works a treat, but I’d recommend granting rights to the WSS_WPG and WSS_ADMIN_WPG local groups in order to make this a permanent fix.

Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part III: Host image build and performance benchmarks

Having agreed the project objectives and designed the system, I turned my attention to the Hyper-V host image build. This is a high-level build guide with start-up time and baseline memory consumption benchmarks at key milestones. These benchmark figures were taken from the Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate build and are admittedly a bit imprecise. However, they do provide an overall indication of system performance as things were added to and removed from the installation. Although I do not have precise figures on RTM improvements, I spot-checked a few of these benchmarks when I rebuilt the system on RTM. Start-up times improved slightly at each milestone. In fact, the final benchmarks came in at 100MB less idle memory used in the RTM release. Continue reading “Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment — Part III: Host image build and performance benchmarks”

Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part II: Design

In the first part of this series, I introduced the pros and cons of various SharePoint development approaches and the objectives of this system redesign. In this part I will focus on design choices and conclusions, starting with the core technology.

Why we’ve chosen Hyper-V

There are broadly five decisive factors: performance, management features (like snapshots), cost, 64-bit OS support and a full host OS (not just a virtualisation administration console): Continue reading “Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment — Part II: Design”

Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment – Part I: Introduction and Objectives

As I’ve alluded to a few times in this blog, over the last few months I’ve led the consultancy and system design for a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment built on Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2. This series of six posts will reveal the key decisions and will consolidate recommendations from a broad range of research and guidance. This first post offers a technology-agnostic introduction to the problem, pros and cons of alternative approaches and what we hoped to achieve with the new approach. The design decisions will be covered in more detail in the second post, followed by a deeper look at detailed build guidance. Continue reading “Building a SharePoint 2007/2010 development environment — Part I: Introduction and Objectives”

SharePoint 2010 links from the first day post-NDA

My RSS Reader was clogged with new SharePoint 2010 stuff this morning from the conference:

You can track my colleagues’ posts from the conference on our corporate blog (where some of this content is cross-posted).

Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 Beta relased

The public beta of DPM 2010 is now available, with major improvements to virtualisation support and agents for other beta technologies like SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010. I hope to test drive it soon. These are two features that are particularly appealing:

Item Level Recovery from host level backup: DPM 2010 Beta supports item level recovery (ILR) which allows you to do granular recovery of files and folders, volumes and virtual hard disks (VHD) from a host level backup of Hyper-V VMs to a network share or a volume on a DPM protected server.

Alternate Host Recovery: DPM 2010 Beta supports alternate location recovery (ALR) which allows you to recover a Hyper-V VM to an alternate stand-alone or clustered Hyper-V host.

And this general improvement:

You will see far fewer “Replica Inconsistent” errors and many of them will automatically get fixed by Auto-Rerun, Auto-CC (Consistency Check).