SharePoint 2010 provides several options for implementing high availability architectures. Key components include web front end servers, application servers, and SQL servers. High availability ensures a predetermined level of uptime through strategies like redundancy, failover, virtualization and disaster recovery. Services like search and user profiles can be made highly available across multiple farms using replication technologies. Monitoring and service distributions are important to achieve redundancy.

1. SharePoint 2010 – High Availability
Thierry Gasser
Technical Specialist Collaboration Platform
Thierryg@microsoft.com

2. Agenda
High Availability versus High Scalability
SharePoint classic architecture for High Scalability
SharePoint High Availability Architecture
Virtualization info.
Q&A

3. High Availability / High Scalability
“High availability is a system design approach and associated
service implementation that ensures a prearranged level of
operational performance will be met during a contractual
measurement period.”
Wikipedia definition
Availability % Downtime / Year Downtime / Month Downtime / Week
99% 3.65 days 7.20 hours 1.68 hours
99.9% 8.76 hours 43.2 minutes 10.1 minutes
99.99% 52.56 minutes 4.32 minutes 1.01 minutes
99.999% 5.26 minutes 25.9 seconds 6.05 seconds
99.9999% 31.5 seconds 2.59 seconds 0.61 seconds
Don’t mix high availability (Farm/Service replication) and high scalability
(Extend the farm to have better performances). In some circumstances they
overlap.

4. Measuring Availability
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748824.aspx

5. RPO/RTO/SLA Requirements
HA is linked to:
Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
Acceptable amount of data loss measured in time
Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
Duration of time within a business process must be restored after a disaster
Service Level Agreements (SLA)
Agreed to levels of service usually between vendors, suppliers and clients or
inter organizational departments
RPO RTO
Time

6. Data Center Considerations for HA
Design for redundancy and availability before
performance
Generally you are constrained by the Hardware
on hand or available for purchase
Full DR (Data Recovery) failover is rare, have
redundant roles in your farm design.

7. Choose an Availability Strategy
Its all about balancing costs versus business
risk
Strategies:
$ - Fault tolerance of hardware components
$$ - Redundancy and failover between server
roles within a farm
$$$ - Redundancy and failover between farms

8. What is a SharePoint Farm?
What is a SharePoint® Farm?
A collection of one or more SharePoint Servers
and SQL Servers® providing a set of basic
SharePoint services bound together by a single
configuration database in SQL Server
Key Components (3 layers):
• Web Front End (WFE) Servers:
o WSS / SharePoint Foundation
o Web Application Service
• Application Servers:
o Search Server
o Excel Services
o PerformancePoint Services
o Access Services
o Visio Services
• SQL Server

9. SharePoint 2010 Tiers - HS
WFE Tiers – Some changes, some optimization
App Server Tiers – Many changes
SQL Tiers – Some changes, heavy optimization

10. Architecture Typical implementation
Information for High Scalability available on:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=fd686cbb-8401-4f25-
b65e-3ce7aa7dbeab&displaylang=en

11. Single Farm vs. Multiple Farms

12. Architecture tips for High Scalability (HS)
Sharepoint can easily scale (recommended max 8
WFE/farm)
Antivirus do not activate on temp file and Search
index
Service can be started and dispatch on mostly
each farm machine.
Some services can be shared over farms to scale
Monitoring is necessary for production to
validate architecture choices.
http://www.learningsharepoint.com/2010/10/16/monitoring-
sharepoint-2010-%e2%80%93-tutorial/
Infra size must not be underestimated, info on:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261700.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263199.aspx

13. Redundancy and Failover
Web and application servers
Web servers – Use multiple servers and load balancing
App servers – Enable SharePoint services on multiple servers
However, SharePoint has some additional availability
considerations
Service applications (Search and User Profile in particular)
Patching or upgrading

14. Services Machine Instances
Most services support multiple instances to run within a single farm to provide
redundancy and scalability.
Service Redundant Scales Service Redundant Scales
Instances Based On Instances Based On
Supported Supported
Access Database Service Yes Users Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Timer Yes N/A
Application Discovery and Load Balancer Yes Users Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Yes Users
Service Application
Application Registry Service Yes Users Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Yes Users
Workflow Timer Service
Business Data Connectivity Service Yes Users PerformancePoint Service Yes Users
Central Administration Yes N/A PowerPoint Service Yes Users
Claims to Windows Token Service Yes Users Search Administration Web Service Yes N/A
Document Conversions Launcher Service Yes Users Search Query and Site Settings Service Yes Users,
Content
Document Conversions Load Balancer Yes Users Secure Store Service Yes Users
Service
Excel Calculation Services Yes Users SharePoint Foundation Help Search No* Users
Lotus Notes Connector Yes Content SharePoint Server Search Yes Content
Managed Metadata Web Service Yes Users User Profile Service Yes Users
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Yes N/A User Profile Synchronization Service No Content
Administration
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Database Yes N/A Visio Graphics Service Yes Users
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Incoming Yes Users Web Analytics Data Processing Service Yes Content
E-Mail
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Sandbox Yes Users Web Analytics Web Service Yes Users
Code Service
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Yes Users Word Automation Services Yes Users
Subscription Settings Service

15. High Availability Within a Single Farm
Single data center
NO !

16. SP2010 HA means especially:
SP2010 service distribution and full redundancy.
SQL 2008 HA: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc678868.aspx
Backup / Restore strategy.
Disaster Recovery strategy
Hardware or Virtual must support all this HA
requests
Network latency (< 1ms…)
1GB or 10GB network speed
Same hardware on all datacenter.
Monitoring (eg: System center)

17. High Availability Within two Farm
One active Farm, one standby farm

18. Workaround: Redundancy and Failover
Service application drill-down – User Profile over 2 Farms.
2 Options:
1. Restore a backup in secondary farm (not
feasible for most)
2. Maintain separate UPA and use the User
Profile Replication Engine (UPRE)
Replicate user profiles and social data every 5
seconds by default
User Profile Replication Engine overview (SharePoint
Server 2010) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc663011.aspx

19. Redundancy and Failover
Service application drill-down – Standard Search over 2 farms
3 Options:
1. Restore a backup in secondary farm (not feasible
for most)
2. Dual-crawl the live farm from the failover farm (not
sensible for most)
3. Maintain separate Search SA and crawl content
locally
Requires read-only access to all content databases for the
duration of a crawl
Requires an up to date SiteMap in the Config DB for new
site collections to be crawled and accessed after failover

20. Sample/Proposal HA Switzerland architecture

21. HA/HS - Role Virtualization Considerations
Virtualization
Role Considerations and Requirements
Decision
Web Role • Easily provision additional servers for load balancing and
Ideal
Render Content fault tolerance
Query Role
• For large indexes, use fixed sized VHD
Process Search Ideal • Requires propagated copy of local index
Queries
Application Role • Provision more servers as resource requirements for
Ideal
Excel Services, etc individual applications increase
• Environments where significant amount of content is not
Index Role
Consider crawled
Crawl Index • Requires enough drive space to store the index corpus
• Environments with lower resource usage requirements
Database Role Consider • Implement SQL Server® alias for the farm required

22. SharePoint 2010 Virtualization Best Practices
Best Practices and Recommendations
• Configure a 1-to-1 mapping of virtual processor to logical processors for
CPU best performance
• Be aware of “CPU bound” issues
Memory • Ensure enough memory is allocated to each virtual machine
• Be aware of underlying disk read write contention between different
Disk virtual machines to their virtual hard disks
• Ensure SAN is configured correctly
• Use VLAN tagging for security
Network • Associate SharePoint® virtual machines to the same virtual switch
• Try to have dedicated network card for each VM to communicate out
• Ensure that integration components are installed on the virtual machine
• Do not use other host roles (use server core)
Others
• Avoid single point of failure: load balance your virtual machines across
hosts and cluster virtual machines

23. Real: What a customer had on datacenter…
134 Virtual
servers
Enterprise Search Farm
Don’t put all your VM in Hosted on 4 Physical
the same… servers
Cluster supporting many
applications including 11
databases -> Perf issues

24. Switzerland HA virtualization
FARMS
Hyper-V
Data Centers

25. Additional Resources
Plan for availability (SharePoint Server 2010):
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc748824.aspx
Plan for disaster recovery (SharePoint Server 2010):
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff628971.aspx
User Profile Replication Engine overview (SharePoint Server
2010): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc663011.aspx
Virtualization for SharePoint Server 2010:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
ca/sharepoint/ff602849.aspx
Boundaries and Limits Document:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx
RAP Program:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/C/1/1C15BA51
-840E-498D-86C6-4BD35D33C79E/Datasheet_SPRAP.pdf

26. © 2010 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This presentation is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary.