Dell EqualLogic Best Practices Series Reference Architecture for a Virtualized SharePoint 2010 Document Management Solution A Dell Technical White Paper This document has been archived and will no longer be maintained or updated. For more information go to the Storage Solutions Technical Documents page on Dell TechCenter or contact support.
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Table of Contents Acknowledgements ..........................................................................................................................................................................iii Feedback ............................................................................................................................................................................................iii Executive summary ....................................................................................
Acknowledgements This whitepaper was produced by the PG Storage Infrastructure and Solutions of Dell Inc.
Executive summary ® ® Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is a flexible and powerful document management and business collaboration application. Due to its breadth of features, configuring a SharePoint 2010 solution that can effectively meet an organization’s needs can be a daunting task.
1 Introduction SharePoint 2010 is a feature rich document management and business collaboration application which requires the deployment and configuration of numerous hardware and software systems. Document management is one of the primary business functions provided by SharePoint 2010.
the consideration of storage array scaling or to a tiering solution with a secondary array system and faster drives for data that is commonly accessed. See the appendix for scaling results of an EqualLogic PS 6100X array. Test Goals The immediate goal of the performance tests was to validate that an EqualLogic PS6100E could support 500 concurrent users accessing the system within the scope of the four primary features of a document management system.
2 Test methodology ® ® In order to simulate 500 concurrent SharePoint users, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate along with the distributed test functionality of Visual Studio test controller and test agents were deployed and simulated user loads were generated to represent random access to the SharePoint 2010 farm. The primary goal of the test methodology was to represent random access to multiple SharePoint 2010 sites, files, and features. 2.
• • • • • • • • • • Five second ‘think times’ between user tests, simulating time between clicks for users Three hour test duration Constant 500 total users No warm-up Visual Studio web test connection model – connections per user Percentage of new users: 100% ® Browser: 100% Internet Explorer 8.
Intranet, 100GB: IT, 800GB: Management, 800GB: Sales, 800GB: Support, 800GB: http://intranet.sis.local – user home page http://intranet.sis.local/sites/it – IT document library http ://intranet.sis.local/sites/sales – Management document library http://intranet.sis.local/sites/sales – Sales document library http ://intranet.sis.
3 Test configuration Figure 1 SharePoint 2010 – Visual Studio 2010 test environment diagram Test Environment Components: • • • • BP1029 Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, PowerEdge R710 Visual Studio SQL Server, Virtualized on Vmware ESXi 5, PowerEdge M805 Visual Studio test controller, virtualized on Vmware ESXi 5, PowerEdge M805 Visual Studio test agents x7, virtualized on Vmware ESXi 5, PowerEdge M905 Reference Architecture for a Virtualized SharePoint 2010 Document Management Solution 10
Figure 2 SharePoint 2010 Farm – storage connectivity BP1029 Reference Architecture for a Virtualized SharePoint 2010 Document Management Solution 11
3.
Web1 R610 #2 Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application Managed metadata web service Search query and site settings service (index + index mirror) Web2 R610 #3 Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Web Application Search query and site settings service (index + index mirror) SharePoint server search (crawl) SQL1 R710 #1 Microsoft SharePoint Foundation database SQL2 R710 #2 Microsoft SharePoint Foundation database 3.
EqualLogic Host Integration Tools (HIT) version 4.0 3.7 EqualLogic HIT configuration The EqualLogic HIT MPIO component provides for architecture aware iSCSI Multipath I/O (MPIO) connectivity between hosts and target arrays in order to optimize performance and availability. In the configuration used in the test SharePoint farm, all IP networks (except the iSCSI network) were removed from MPIO load balancing and all other configuration options were left on their original default setting.
4 Test results The results in the tables below reveal the performance results of simulating 500 concurrent users with the two workloads described in section 2 above. The first workload simulates an environment where SharePoint users are focused on putting large numbers of documents into document libraries for archival purposes. The second workload shows a more balanced environment where SharePoint users primarily use the system to read existing articles, calendar entries, and documents.\ During the 3 hour t
Figure 3 workload one: Heavy upload environment – I/O Live View session Notice that the heavy upload workload consists of nearly 70% writes, yet read latency is higher. The reason for this is that host writes are acknowledged after caching them on the array controllers. . The read latency is primarily due to the need for fetching data from the array disk drives as opposed to cache.
Figure 4 workload two: Heavy browse environment – I/O Live View session The more read intensive heavy browse workload reveals an interesting anamoly where writes are a common occurrence, particularly writes to tempdb which can be seen in figure 5 below. With nearly as many writes as the heavy upload test, optimizing the RAID configuration for numerous random writes will increase performance for the document management solution.
5 Conclusion From the tests and data analysis in this white paper it can be concluded that: • • • • BP1029 A single EqualLogic PS6100E array can easily and effectively support a virtualized SharePoint 2010 medium farm solution of up to 5,000 active SharePoint users utilizing a conservative 10% concurrency model, even beyond 65% array capacity utilization. Both use cases above can support more than 500 concurrent users.
6 Best Practices • • • • 7 BP1029 Establish a performance baseline after configuring your primary SharePoint 2010 feature set. Then you will be able to see how much each additional feature or group of users you add after that point affects the system. Running a SharePoint 2010 farm on web front end servers and search query servers with just 2 CPUs provided plenty of processing power for 5000 active users.
7 Appendix In order to provide valuable scaling performance results for the workloads above, the entire web farm, except the cloned data, was migrated to an EqualLogic PS6100X 10k SAS array. This array was above the 65% capacity with just the SharePoint data and it is implied that snapshots (simulated as clones) would be offloaded onto a second array system in order to optimize cost per capacity. The tests were then run once more with 1000 concurrent users, or 10,000 active users based upon 10% concurrency.
Table 4 Workload 2: heavy browse environment with 10k SAS disksHeavy browse environment with 24 SAS Disks Concurrent users tested Storage IOPs at 1000 users Write latency Read latency Web server CPUs 1000 1774 2.4ms 12.2ms <2% (4 CPUs each) Web server 2 CPUs** Search – Query server CPUs SQL server CPUs 64.
Additional resources Support.dell.com is focused on meeting your needs with proven services and support. DellTechCenter.com is an IT Community where you can connect with Dell Customers and Dell employees for the purpose of sharing knowledge, best practices, and information about Dell products and your installations. Referenced or recommended Dell publications: • • Dell EqualLogic Configuration Guide: http://en.community.dell.com/dell-groups/dtcmedia/m/mediagallery/19852516/download.aspx.
THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND.
