SharePoint Server 2007 Server Farm Use Case

8/7/2019 SharePoint Server 2007 Server Farm Use Case

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1 Sun Systems for Microsoft Hyper-V R2: SharePoint Server 2007 Server Farm Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Systems for MicrosoftHyper-V R2

SharePoint Server 2007Server Farm Use CaseVersion 1.0Randal Sagrillo

October 2009


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Table of Contents

SharePoint Server 2007 Use Case Overview.............................................................................3SharePoint Server Farm Hardware Configuration......................................................................4Physical Server Hardware Configuration - Sun Fire X4170...................................................4Expansion Storage Hardware Configuration - Sun Storage J4200........................................5

SharePoint Server Farm Virtual Machine Layout.......................................................................6Virtual Machine Resource Allocation......................................................................................7

Solution Validation.......................................................................................................................9Acceptable User Response Times.........................................................................................9Test Configuration...................................................................................................................950 User Baseline Test Results Summary.............................................................................10350 User Test Results Summary..........................................................................................12

Conclusions...............................................................................................................................13Appendix A: Configuration Details............................................................................................14Disk Configuration Details.........................................................................................................14VM and Network Configuration Details.....................................................................................17


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SharePoint Server 2007 Use Case Overview

This paper describes technical implementation and testing results of a SharePoint Server2007 server farm implemented using the Sun Systems for Microsoft Hyper-V R2 solution.

The four key objectives for this use case were:

Design this server farm such that it meets or exceeds MS performance guidelines(i.e.sub-second response times for all operations).

Implement the entire SharePoint server farm in the smallest possible 'footprint:' Ideallyone rack unit total for all compute elements.

Use minimum disk resources (spindles) for this transactionally (I/O) oriented workload(under the assumption that adding disk capacity (spindles) will further increase

transactional performance via increased disk IOPS in customer deployments).

Validate use case performance using the guidelines available from the MSDN.

The SharePoint Server 2007 server farm described in this paper was designed, implementedand tested by Sun engineers at the Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center in Redmond,Washington. Validation and testing were completed in July 2009. All test results were againstbuild 7233 (pre-RTM) of Windows Server 2008 R2.

Readers of this paper are assumed to have some technical and implementation familiaritywith Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft SharePoint 2007

Server and its support components (including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, ActiveDirectory, and other Microsoft applications) It is also recommended that readers refer to thefollowing resources for specifics of Sun Systems for Hyper-V R2.

Sun Systems for Hyper-V R2 Hardware Requirements Guide for Midsize Companies Sun Blueprint: Configuring Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V on Sun Fire x64

Servers


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SharePoint Server Farm Hardware Configuration

The Sun Systems for Hyper-V 2008 R2 solution specifies the Sun Fire X4270 server and SunStorage J4400 Expansion arrays. As the target size was 1000 SharePoint users, the solution

is based on the Medium Configuration, but customized using a smaller chassis and nexthigher clock rate CPU's.

Physical Server Hardware Configuration - Sun Fire X4170

The Sun Fire X4170 enabled a 50% reduction in footprint. The Sun Fire X4170 deliversnearly identical functionality, performance and behavior to the Sun Fire x4270 in half the size(1 RU vs. 2 RU), except for featuring three instead of six PCIe Gen2 expansion slots; eightinstead of sixteen internal hard disk drives and and smaller fans and smaller power supplies.The X4170 is configured as follows:

Two Quad-Core Xeon 5570 2.93 GHz processors (Nehalem) with two hardwarestrands (threads) per core for 16 high performance hardware strands per server. 72GB of DDR3 RAM. Four 10/100/1000 Mbps physical Ethernet NICs minimum per server (plus ILOM NIC.) Dual Redundant Hot swappable power supplies. Redundant Hot Swappable Cooling Fans. Three PCIe Gen2 I/O slots. Eight internal 146GB 10KRPM SAS Hot Pluggable Hard Disk Drives. Sun StorageTek Internal SAS RAID HBA to build hardware RAID arrays using the

internal hard disk drives above (PCIe Slot 0.)

This gives a total SharePoint Server 2007 server farm footprint of 1 RU (Rack Unit) or 1.75 ofrack height for a very dense physical package.


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Expansion Storage Hardware Configuration - Sun Storage J4200

Likewise, to reduce the storage rack footprint by half, Sun engineers deployed the SunStorage J4200 which delivers nearly identical functionality, performance and behavior to the

Sun Storage J4400 in half the footprint (2 RU vs. 4 RU) except for featuring twelve instead oftwenty-four internal hard disk drives (HDDs) and associated smaller fans and smaller powersupplies. Additionally, testing included one Sun StorageTek External SAS RAID HBA in PCIeSlot 1 for the X4170 to build hardware RAID arrays using the HDDs in the J4200 expansionchassis. The J4200 is configured as follows:

Twelve 146GB 15KRPM SAS Hot Pluggable Hard Disk Drives. Single IOM (only one SAS cable connection allowed per SAS RAID HBA.) Dual Redundant Hot swappable power supplies (also provide cooling.)


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SharePoint Server Farm Virtual Machine Layout

Hyper-V 2008 R2 supports up to eight guest virtual machines (VMs.) To implement theSharePoint server farm, there are six key roles that need to be isolated into separate

machines (VMs in this case) based on best practice. The roles are:

Two Web Front Ends (IIS) for load sharing and resiliency SharePoint Indexing Server SharePoint Excel Services Exchange Server SQL Server

Also, a domain controller was required. For this testing, the domain controller was placed in aseparate virtual machine within the solution. Many deployments may already contain anexternal domain controller which can simply connect the servers to the active domain.

Finally, for ease of maintenance, a master VM was used for testing updates to speedexecution and agility.

In addition to the Virtual Machines, two Virtual Network Switches were created. One toconnect all servers together: the VM Network. The other a Virtual Network Load BalancerSwitch used to connect the two Web Front Ends to the network clients. Each of these virtualnetworks is associated with a separate physical gigabit ethernet port, leaving two sparegigabit ethernet ports for future expansion.


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Virtual Machine Resource Allocation

Each virtual machine is assigned the following resources:

a virtual NIC to the VM network a .vhd for it's C: drive.

Virtual CPUs and memory were allocated per the table below.

VM Resource Allocation Table

In addition, the Exchange and SQL servers have data and log pass through disks for higherperformance.

Screenshot of the system drives (LUNS) is shown below.

Virtual Machine Role VM Name

Active Directory Domain Controller DC 1 2

SharePoint Excel Services EXCELSVCS 4 8

Exchange Server EXCH2K7-R2 2 8

Administrative Master/Parent Master 1 1SharePoint Indexing Server Sharepoint2k7 4 8

SQL Server SQL1 2 8

Web Front End 1 WFE1 4 8

Web Front End 2 WFE2 4 8

# of Virtual

CPUs

Memory

(GB)


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Finally, as previously indicated, each of the Web Front Ends also has a Network Load

Balancing NIC provisioned and attached to the virtual NLB switch. Configuration details forthe solution can be found in Appendix A.


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Solution Validation

The model for solution validation was based on methods described in 'Plan for software

boundaries (Microsoft SharePoint Services)' which is available at:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287790.aspx#section3

The key acceptance criteria being user response times. The following excerpt from the Plan

above:

Acceptable User Response Times

The following table provides guidelines for acceptable user response times for four types ofuser operations. Note that your business requirements may allow longer or shorter responsetimes than suggested.

The testing goal was to provide sub-second response time for all end-user operations.However, this is not possible in all cases, so the guidelines in the following table were used.

Type of operation Examples Acceptable user response time

Common operation Browsing to the home page

Browsing to a document

library


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50 User Baseline Test Results Summary

To validate operation of the server farm, a simple 50 user baseline ran for ~30 minutes asshown below.

50 User Baseline Load Test Summary

Test Run Information

Load test name LoadTest2

Description

Start time 7/6/2009 10:27:22 AM

End time 7/6/2009 10:56:33 AM

Warm-up duration 00:00:00

Duration 00:29:10

Controller EXCH2K7-R2Number of agents 5

Run settings used Run Settings1

Overall Results

Max User Load 50

Requests/Sec 1,264

Requests Failed 0

Requests Cached Percentage 0

Avg. Response Time (sec) 0.068


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Avg. Content Length (bytes) 8,676

Tests/Sec 61.3

Tests Failed 0

Avg. Test Time (sec) 0.84

Avg. Transaction Time (sec) 0Avg. Page Time (sec) 0.83

Key Statistic: Top 5 Slowest Pages

URL (Link to More Details) Avg. Page Time (sec)

http://spweb/sites/sitedirectory/Pages/c... 0.90

http://spweb/sites/SiteDirectory/Pages/c... 0.82

http://spweb/sites/BigHierarchyPublishin... 0.79

Key Statistic: Top 5 Slowest Tests

Name Avg. Test Time (sec)

sitesdirectory 0.90

sitesdirectorysitesincategory 0.83

sitemanager 0.79

Test Results

Name Scenario Total Tests Failed Tests (% of total) Avg. Test Time (sec)

sitesdirectory Scenario1 32,698 0 (0) 0.90

sitesdirectorysitesincategory Scenario1 33,674 0 (0) 0.83

sitemanager Scenario1 40,913 0 (0) 0.79

Page Results

URL (Link to More Details) Scenario Test

Avg.PageTime(sec)

Count

http://spweb/sites/sitedirectory/Pages/category.aspx Scenario1 sitesdirectory 0.90 32,698

http://spweb/sites/SiteDirectory/Pages/categoryresults.aspx Scenario1 sitesdirectorysitesincategory 0.82 33,674

http://spweb/sites/BigHierarchyPublishingWeb/pages/default.aspxScenario1 sitemanager 0.79 40,913 Transaction Results

Name Scenario Test Response Time (sec) Elapsed Time (sec) Count

System Under Test Resources

Machine Name % Processor Time Available Memory at Test Completion (Mb)

WFE1 77.3 6,824

WFE2 64.2 6,910

Controller and Agents Resources


EXCELSVCS 27.0 7,316

U40-LEFT 33.6 5,645

SQL1 37.5 2,800

SHAREPOINT2K7 0.89 6,685

EXCH2K7-R2 77.6 6,965
http://test:1/http://test:2/http://test:0/http://test:1/http://test:2/http://test:0/http://test:1/http://test:2/http://test:0/http://test:1/http://test:2/http://test:0/


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350 User Test Results Summary

Then, assuming 1/3 users would be concurrently active on a 1000 user divisional portal, a350 user load test run was performed for 2 hours. The results are shown below.

350 User Load Test SummaryTest Run Information

Load test name ReadMix-350-0Wait-old

Description

Start time 7/11/2009 2:57:27 PM

End time 7/11/2009 4:58:53 PM

Warm-up duration 00:00:00

Duration 02:01:26

Controller EXCH2K7-R2

Number of agents 5

Run settings used Run Settings1

Overall ResultsMax User Load 350

Requests/Sec 687

Requests Failed 7

Requests Cached Percentage 24.9

Avg. Response Time (sec) 0.56

Avg. Content Length (bytes) 28,270

Tests/Sec 430

Tests Failed 7

Avg. Test Time (sec) 0.80

Avg. Transaction Time (sec) 0

Avg. Page Time (sec) 0.75Key Statistic: Top 5 Slowest Pages

URL (Link to More Details) Avg. Page Time (sec)

http://spweb/sites/test1/testdoclib_A1/F... 2.55

http://spweb/sites/test1/Lists/testlist1... 0.65

http://spweb/sites/test1/testdoclib_A1/t... 0.65

http://spweb/sites/test1/Default.aspx 0.64

http://spweb/sites/test1/testdoclib_A1/t... 0.62

Key Statistic: Top 5 Slowest Tests

Name Avg. Test Time (sec)

WSSSmallDocLibAllItems 3.21

WSSDispForm 0.65

WSSHomePage 0.64

WSSDocHTTPFetch 0.62

Test Results

Name Scenario Total Tests Failed Tests (% of total) Avg. Test Time (sec)

WSSSmallDocLibAllItems ReadMix 196,305 4 (0.0020) 3.21

WSSDispForm ReadMix 964,856 1 (0.00010) 0.65

WSSHomePage ReadMix 970,048 1 (0.00010) 0.64

WSSDocHTTPFetch ReadMix 999,036 1 (0.00010) 0.62

Page Results
http://test:3/http://test:0/http://test:2/http://test:1/http://test:3/http://test:0/http://test:2/http://test:1/http://test:3/http://test:0/http://test:2/http://test:1/http://test:3/http://test:0/http://test:2/http://test:1/


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URL (Link to More Details) Scenario TestAvg. Page Time(sec)

Count

http://spweb/sites/test1/testdoclib_A1/Forms/Allitems.aspx ReadMix WSSSmallDocLibAl lItems 2.55 196,305

http://spweb/sites/test1/Lists/testlist1/DispForm.aspx ReadMix WSSDispForm 0.65 964,856

http://spweb/sites/test1/testdoclib_A1/test1.txt ReadMix WSSSmallDocLibAl lItems 0.65 196,305

http://spweb/sites/test1/Default.aspx ReadMix WSSHomePage 0.64 970,048

http://spweb/sites/test1/testdoclib_A1/test1.txt ReadMix WSSDocHTTPFetch 0.62 999,036

Transaction Results

Name Scenario Test Response Time (sec) Elapsed Time (sec) Count

System Under Test Resources


Controller and Agents Resources


EXCELSVCS 42.8 6,999

U40-LEFT 20.7 5,750

SQL1 65.6 1,763

SHAREPOINT2K7 2.27 7,074EXCH2K7-R2 1.47 6,691

Errors

Type SubtypeCount

Last Message

Exception

SocketException

5A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period oftime, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond 10.5.20.247:80

HttpError

401 -Unauthorized

2 401 - Unauthorized

Analysis of the errors recorded above (7 total errors out of 3 Million test runs) determined that

all errors were part of the test rig scripting and not due to resourcing issues as part of the loadtesting.

Conclusions

Sun Systems for Microsoft Hyper-V R2 can deliver cost effective, dense, simple to manageand high performance solutions for Midsize companies. In this detailed testing, an entireSharePoint Server 2007 server farm implemented on a single server solution is shown todeliver sub-second response times for a variety of web office portal queries. For moreinformation, please refer to: http://www.sun.com/solutions/midsize/hyperv.jsp.
http://error:0/http://error:0/http://error:1/http://error:0/http://error:0/http://error:1/http://error:1/


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Appendix A: Configuration Details

Disk Configuration Details

Using Sun's Integrated Lights Out Management (ILOM) remote console, the actual array(LUN) configurations for each of the two arrays controllers is shown.


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VM and Network Configuration Details

Using RDP, the actual VM and network settings used during testing are shown.


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Note that the Network Configs for each of the two NLB NIC's in each of the WFE's will have

MAC address spoofing enabled.


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Again note that the NLB network and VM network are on separate physical Gigabit Ethernet

ports on the x4170.

Documents

SharePoint Server 2007 Server Farm Use Case