The SharePoint Redemption

Upgrade Part 1 Fundamentals Break-out session notes from SPC 2009.

NOTE:  New content just uploaded to TechNet for Upgrade Scenarios HERE.

Upgrade Scenarios

• Supported Scenarios:
• In-Place Upgrade
• Database Attach Upgrade:
• Content Database
• Profile Service Database
• Project Service Database
• Singlie Click Install – SQL Migration
• Windows Internal Database > SQL Express 2008 + File Stream RBS
• Unsupported
• Upgrade from earlier than WSS v3 SP2 or MOSS 2007/SP2
• Direct upgrade from WSS v2/SPS 2003 or earlier
• Side by Side installation
• Gradual Upgrade

Upgrade Prep Tools

• WSS v3/MOSS 2007 SP2
• Farm Insight
• Pre-Upgrade Checker
• stsadm –o EnumAllWebs (Now includes the features that are installed in a Web)
• SPDiag V2
• Customizations gathering
• stsadm –o ExportIPFSAdminObjects
• SharePoint 2010
• Farm Insight
• stsadm –o EnumAllWebs
• SPDisg 2010 (TBD)
• Content Database Insight
• Test-SPContentDatabase

Pre-Upgrade Checker Command

Command: stsadm –o preupgradecheck [-localonly]

• Details
• Reports farm and server data
• Identifies useful farm information
• Identifies current or potential issues
• Modes
• Load server + farm databases (default)
• Local server only
• Makes no changes to environment or data (Yes!  This was a huge complaint with going from 2003 to 2007)
• Introduced in SP2; improved in October 2009 CU
• Not required like it was for upgrading from 2003 to 2007 but still highly recommended
• Rules Files (Partial List)
• Informational
• Farm Servers, Databases
• AAM Configuration
• Lists Site Definitions, Features, Web Parts, Event Receivers
• Installed Language Packs
• CAML views/CAML content types
• Issues
• Missing Site Definitions, Features, Assemblies
• Data orphans
• Modified content databases
• Command outputs an easy to read HTML-based file

Test-SPContentDatabase Command

• Content database insight from O14
• Complements pre-upgrade checker report
• Reports data from server/database paring
• Compare against a specific web app
• Identifies current or potential issues:
• Data orphans
• Missing site definitions
• Missing features
• Missing assemblies
• Can show table sizing metrics
• Scan O12 and O14 content databases
• Makes no changes to the database(s)

Windows PowerShell Upgrade Cmdlets

Note: B2B – Patching Upgrades,V2V Version to Version Upgrade

• Upgrade-SPContentDatabase
• Content database B2B/V2V upgrade
• Common Scenarios:
• Initiate/resume content database B2B upgrades
• Resume failed content database V2V upgrades
• Upgrade-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
• Search Service Application Instance B2B upgrade
• Upgrade-SPSingleSignOnDatabase
• O12 data to Secure Store database V2V upgrade

Feature Upgrade Capability

• Optional Capability
• Version Ranging for B2B or V2V Upgrades
• Declarative Feature Upgrade Activities (Final list for RTM, stated that there “may” be more in the future)
• ApplyElementManifests
• AddContentTypeField
• MapFile
• Custom Code Feature Upgrade
• CustomUpgradeAction Activity
• SPFeatureReceiver.FeatureUpgrading
• Assembly in GAC

Visual Upgrade Capability

• Stay in O12 UI (default) or move to O14 UI
• O14 ships O12 Master pages and CSS
• UI Preview capability (Recommend to perform limited changes will in preview mode)
• Farm admin or site admin controlled
• Web level settings and OM
• Some items not O12 compatible:
• My site host
• PWS site collection
• Report Server web parts

Patch Management Capability

• Patching state insight
• Patch management UI
• Patch reporting PowerShell UI
• Patch status health rules
• Backwards compatibility mode (This is awesome!  No need to upgrade the entire farm right after patch install)
• Binaries can be ahead of the database(s)
• Defer upgrade for short period of time
• Not intended for long duration

Downtime Mitigation Process

• WSS v3/MOSS 2007 SP2
• Read-only databases
• Parallel upgrade farms
• Gradual Upgrade
• SharePoint 2010
• Read-only databases
• Parallel upgrade farms
• Single farm, multiple upgrade sessions
• Content database attach with AAM redirection

Upgrade Logging/Status Reporting

• Upgrade Logging
• New – One upgrade log per sessions
• New – Upgrade errors only log
• New – Fixed upgrade log schema
• Upgrade Status Reporting
• Improved – Upgrade status page (This is SO much better.  It provides a lot more information during upgrade compared to the 2007 version.  It will also show all concurrent database upgrades.)
• New – Upgrade status history
• New – Command line progress indication

Upgrading a MOSS 2007 Farm

• Each SSP upgrades into:
• A Search service app
• A User profiles service app
• An excel service app
• An application registry back-compat service app
• A new managed metadata service app
• Web application association are preserved
• a proxy is created for each service app
• New databases are created

This is a recap of what I could capture during the Scaling SharePoint 2010 Topologies for Your Organization Session.  The big change here is around Service Applications.  It allows you more flexibility when scaling your architecture.  I will add a follow-up post later covering the migration piece they glanced over in this session as I am attending the migration deep-dive session.

Service Architecture Recap

• Flexible Deployment Model
  • Improved Security Model
  • Claims Based Authentication
• Cross-farm communication via web services
• Service Isolation
  • Each service app uses separate database and optionally separate app pool.
  • Support for multiple service apps for a service with different accounts and databases
• Multi-Tenancy
  • Some Service Apps can be partitioned to handle multiple tenants

Choosing an Architecture

• Consider both logical and physical aspects
• Start with a logical architecture
  • Consolidated vs Distributed
• Build it out as a physical architecture
• Scale out as needed

Logical Topology Considerations

• Business Needs
  • Organization many need isolation between respective services (ie. HR, Legal, etc)
• Regulatory Restrictions
  • Geopolitical
  • Regulatory
• Information Architecture
  • Architecture of web sites influence association to Services

Physical Topology Considerations

• Scale
  • Scale-up/Scale-out needs influence physical topology
• Link Latency
  • Host services close to users and content
• Directory Architecture
  • Host services close to directory for better auth

Scaling Services – Option 1

• Scale within the farm
• Scale-up
• Scale-out on each tier
  • Add WFEs for content servers
  • Additional app servers for computer-intensive services
  • Scale SQL for data-centric services
• “Affinitize”
  • Specific web apps to WFEs using NLBs
  • Services on specific app servers

Scaling Services – Option 2

• Multiple Farms
• Split services into separate farm
  • Security boundary
  • Usage/scale
  • Political/organizational
  • patching flexibility
• Multiple services farms
  • Geo-distributed
  • Load
  • Split search out first

***UPDATE***
Updated with content from Enterprise Search Deep-Dive Session.

Just attended the Enterprise Search Overview for SharePoint 2010 at SPC2009.  It focused a lot around the FAST integration with SP2010.  Below are some quick notes I took.  Obviously I was not able to capture everything, but there is some cool new stuff coming out…

New Capabilities:

• Increased Scalability over MOSS 2007
• Multiple Crawlers
• Query: Partition and mirror the index
• Sub-second latency scaling to 100 Million documents
• Rich Content Processing
• Wizard driven installation
• Full Fault Tolerance
• Native 64-bit: hyper-v support
• Powershell Support
• SCOM support
• Full search reporting

Search Product Line:

• Search Server 2010 Express (Still Free)
  • Basic Search
• SharePoint Server 2010
  • Intranet-wide search, people and expertise search
• FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
  • Visual experiences, extreme adaptability and Advanced Content Processing

Scalability:

• Multiple Indexers (Yes! True redundancy!)
• Indexers are stateless crawlers and do not store a copy of the index.  They crawl, index, and immediately propagate to Query Servers.
• Index Partitioning
• Query Mirroring
• Multiple Property Databases
• Admin Database + Admin Component (equivalent of SSP database in MOSS)
• Crawl Distribution
  • Built-in load balancer distributes hosts to crawl databases
  • Crawlers crawl content that is covered by crawl database
  • Default configuration can be overwritten using host distribution rules
• Query Distribution
  • Low query latency if all index partitions are equal in size
  • Distribution by hash of documentId
  • Crawlers partitions indexed data and propagate to query servers
• Multiple scale-out options now, including multiple crawl databases on the same SQL server or multiple SQL servers

Engine Enhancements

• Support for regular expressions in Crawl Rules
• Native support for crawling case sensitive repositories
• Ability to prioritize Content Sources to distribute crawler resources
• New Crawl Policy to define how crawler treats error conditions
• Low indexing downtime (Search now only pauses for approx. an hour during backups)

Extensibility Enhancements

*Note: Protocol handler API still supported

• Change web part properties – no code
  • Modify XSLT
  • Modify config XML
    • Refinement Panel – control metadata available for refinement
    • Advanced Search – control metadata available for advanced search queries
• Extend OOB web parts programatically
  • All OOB web parts are public (Sweet!)
• Connector Framework
  • Support for attachments
  • Item level security
  • Crawl through entity associations
• Inline caching for better citizenships
• Richer crawl options
  • Regular full crawl
  • Time stamp based incremental crawl
  • Change log crawl + deleted count
  • Change log + delete log crawl

Ricker Manageability

• Consolidated admin UI dashboard
• Automated service password management through “managed accounts”
• PowerShell support for scripted administration
• Built-in system health monitoring, support for SCOM monitoring and alerting
• Built-in and extensible search analytics

Seach Site:

• Native Wildcard Search
• Type-ahead search box (aka Query Suggestions)

Search Results Page New Features:

• Metadata Extraction
• Refinement Panel
  • Filtering by Results Type, Site, Author, Modified Date (displayed in a separate panel kind of like federated results)
  • Suggested Searches
• Did you mean?

FAST – Search Results Page Additional New Features:

• Thumbnail of document appears with each result (This is awesome!)
• Preview documents within the search results window
• View in Browser Link
• Similar Results
• Refinement Panel (In addition to items listed above)
  • Dynamically generate metadata from documentation for filtering (Metadata fields do not have to be populated first
• Rich Text Best Bets (including images)
• Federate Results directly to desktop

People Search:

• “Address Book Style” Search
  • Phonetic name matching
  • Nickname matching
• Refinement Panel
  • Filtering on Focus, Job Title, Past Projects, Interests
• Vanity Search (Self Search) – When a user looks themselves up in People Search
  • Help People Find Me Appears
    • Results return the users profile seen by others in the search results.  Also returns some metrics including the number of searches that led to them and keywords
• Additional Drill-down for Each User
  • Browse in Organizational Chart
  • View Recent Content

Connectors:

• Indexing Connectors
• Supports the OpenSearch Standard for Federation

Reporting and Administration:

• Greatly Refined
• Search Administration dashboard (looks much like the one added with MOSS 2007 SP2) is web part based and can be easily customized
• Error log reporting will now allow the administrator to select a specific item and decide whether to remove the item from the index or re-crawl.

There were also several web analytics enhancements for more robust reporting.

More later.

Jeff