Sharepoint Tips and Tricks - Cory Burns

Case Study : Coca Cola Enterprises on SharePoint Online!

coryburns — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:05:00 GMT

Its only been about 25 months since I posted. Lets just say business is good and it keeps me busy :) A quick update - I am now Senior Escalation Engineer for SharePoint Online in the Online Services Division at Microsoft. Here is recently released case study on one of our customers Coca Cola Enterprises and their success with our service :)

Coca-Cola Enterprise migrates to Microsoft Online Services

http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/US/details/470b9f4c-bac8-4be9-b22a-d1a6953ef6a7

-Cory

SharePoint IIS Traffic Analysis

coryburns — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:46:00 GMT

SharePoint IIS Traffic Analysis

Internally we have experienced situations where internal users have built tools or solutions which have negatively affected performance for our SharePoint users. This can be done in different ways such as Setting up multiple MOSS Farms to crawl our customer facing front ends at high performance setting or creating a custom application to execute against various MOSS web services without throttling the application in any way. From that need spawned a little tool we created with the help of log parser J The following is an example of how you could setup a scheduled task to notify you on number of Hits against your moss environments and how much bandwidth each user is consuming.

Please remember to never perform any of the following on production without first trying it out in a test environment, all items here are merely examples of how you ‘could’ perform such an action. J

Skills and Items required / assumed to perform this task.

· A SQL 2005 server with XP_CMDSHELL enabled

· Read Permissions for SQL Server Account Granted to the IIS Log directory of your SharePoint Servers

· Access to create and modify databases on your SQL Server

· Logparser 2.2 Installed on your SQL Server

· Good Understanding of SQL Server and TSQL

· Good Understanding of IIS

· Access to all customer Facing SharePoint Front Ends

· Good Understanding of SharePoint J

Step 1: Create a reporting database on your SQL Server, for the benefit of this blog entry we will call this database IISReports. Set that reporting database to autogrow for the data file and log file.

Step 2: Grant read permissions to all IIS log directories where your Web application Logs are stored on all servers you wish to report on.

Example: %WINDIR%\System32\Logfiles\ex080218.log For better performance internally we place our IIS Log files on a serperate drive

Step 3: Install Logparser 2.2 to a directory on your sql server(make note of this directory) For the purpose of this entry we will call this c:\temp\logparser.exe

Logparser 2.2 can be downloaded @ http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/tools/logparser/default.mspx

Step 4: Create Tables that we will use to pull in and manipulate the data

Click Here to open example Script

Step 5: execute the Create script for the stored procedure that will be used to pull the data.

Click Here to Open example Script – Make sure to read the /**notes**/ as they direct you to make changes to the script to cater to your environment.

Step 6: If everything has been followed and updated accordingly you can now run the following in SQL.. shortly there after you will receive an email similar to the following J

use [IISReports]

exec IISLogtracking

Example email received

Top 20 for BW used

Bandwidth Used(MB)	Total Hits	Logfilename	Url Host		Username	IP
20563	114502	\\servername\e$\w3svc\ex080226.log	sharepoint	Domain\username		127.0.0.1
5317	438216	\\servername\e$\w3svc\ex080226.log	sharepoint		Domain\username	127.0.0.1
4074	9055	\\servername\e$\w3svc\ex080226.log	sharepoint		Domain\username	127.0.0.1
2854	7720	\\servername\e$\w3svc\ex080226.log	sharepoint		Domain\username	127.0.0.1
2231	42288	\\servername\e$\w3svc\ex080226.log	my		Domain\username	127.0.0.1

Top 20 for Total Hits

Total Hits	Logfilename	Url Host	UserName	IP	Bandwidth Used (MB)
438216	\\servername\e$\w3svc\ex080226.log	sharepoint	Domain\username	127.0.0.1	5317
114502	\\servername\e$\w3svc\ex080226.log	sharepoint	Domain\username	127.0.0.1	20563
92346	\\servername\e$\w3svc\ex080226.log	sharepoint	Domain\username	127.0.0.1	532
56829	\\servername\e$\w3svc\ex080226.log	my	Domain\username	127.0.0.1	122
42288	\\servername\e$\w3svc\ex080226.log	my	Domain\username	127.0.0.1	2231

Cory

MSIT SharePoint Reporting Framework 2.0 Released!

coryburns — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 20:41:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce I have finished version 2.0 of the MSIT SharePoint Reporting Framework. Versions 1.0 was used heavily internally for our service metrics and operational tracking. With version 2.0 many great improvements have come out of it, additionally with the release to the public :) I encourage everyone to head over and check it out. Thanks!!

http://www.codeplex.com/MSITSRF

This is one of many very great tools that will be available on the CD included in our upcoming book 'SharePoint for Architects and Engineers'

Online Services from Microsoft Launched! (SharePoint , Exchange among others)

coryburns — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:18:00 GMT

"Online services from Microsoft are hosted solutions for businesses with advanced IT needs, including the ability to control access to data, manage users, apply business and compliance policy, and meet high availability standards. These services deliver the core enterprise-class capabilities of Microsoft software as hosted business services, providing the performance, scalability, security, management features, and service level capabilities to support mission-critical applications"

See the full detailed site at www.microsoft.com/online

Go SharePoint! :)

Cory

High Performance Upgrades for MOSS 2007 & WSS 3.0 (Database Migration Methods)

coryburns — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 22:30:00 GMT

If you’re looking for the best performance and quickest upgrade I highly recommend the Database Migration approach. At MSIT our preferred method is such, it allows a creative flexible upgrade path that has the fastest throughput. Using a method we call parallel upgrades, in MSIT we were able to upgrade at 4 times faster than a standard database migration. What is a parallel farm upgrade you ask? Well read on :)

Consider the following scenario

4 Terabytes of data to upgrade

12,000 site collections to upgrade

48 hours to complete the upgrade

Product throughput on optimal hardware from our experiences internally was 50-70GB per hour.

Let’s assume we only get 50GB/hr that comes out to around 80 hours to complete, this was not fast enough in our situation. With that being said we had to get creative and came up with the parallel method. This entails creating multiple single box farms with single web applications on a shared high powered SQL 2005 cluster and balancing out the database attach. Let’s assume that http://portal has 80 content databases at 50GB per database.

Some standards to note that we hold true internally.

· Your root site should be kept in its own database with the site warning maximum set to 0/1, this allows for easy manipulation of the root site in upgrades away from the rest of the farm

· Site collection count / Site size should be balanced accordingly internally we try to maintain no more than 500 site collections per database, once reaching that limit we cap off the database and create a new content database (this will not be true if you are going toward a database mirror scenario) reason being is due to the max quotas we have set on site collections this is the best site cap by design storage wise. In your environment this may be different.

The following steps are assuming you have already run prescan on your environment and cleaned up any discrepancies. Additionally the assumption would be you have a new Production MOSS Farm created and awaiting your content databases. For more information on prescan Bill Baer has several great posts explaining this in detail @ http://blogs.technet.com/wbaer/search.aspx?q=prescan&p=1

Step 1 would be to create the 4 farms; this can be virtualized however in our experience we used physical hardware.

Step 2 would be to backup your databases, in a database migration approach you would backup your databases, restore them with new names and upgrade your backups, thus in the event you need to back-out your old farm with your old databases are running untouched.

Step 3 would be to create your batch files for easy automation of your database migration. Your batch files may look similar to the following. Please only upgrade copies of your databases and never the actual databases if at all possible. Also once you execute a database attach command the schema changes instantly, canceling the command will not save the database J

Batch1.cmd

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp1 –databasename contentdb_1 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp1 –databasename contentdb_2 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp1 –databasename contentdb_3 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp1 –databasename contentdb_4 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Batch2.cmd

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp2 –databasename contentdb_5 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp2 –databasename contentdb_6 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp2 –databasename contentdb_7 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp2 –databasename contentdb_8 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Batch3.cmd

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp3 –databasename contentdb_9 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp3 –databasename contentdb_10 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp3 –databasename contentdb_11 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp3 –databasename contentdb_12 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Batch4.cmd

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp4 –databasename contentdb_13 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp4 –databasename contentdb_14 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp4 –databasename contentdb_15 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://webapp4 –databasename contentdb_16 –databaseserver SQLsrvA

Notice how we are evenly distributing the content databases between the 4 parallel farms. These batch files should be ran from your bin folder on their respected parallel farm installs (%systemdrive%\program files\common files\web server extensions\12\bin)

Once all 4 batch scripts have completed check your upgrade.log on all 4 parallel farms for discrepancies.

Step 4 Verify upgrade has completed successfully for all databases

Step 5 Detach all of your databases from the parallel farms, this can be done by modifying your batch scripts to use stsadm –o deletecontentdb rather then addcontentdb.

Step 6 Create a new batch file that would dbattach all of your upgraded databases to your production MOSS farm that you have created and waiting on standby. Ensure that you DBattach your root site collection database first.

And that’s it! Essentially we have quadrupled the throughput of your database migration.

Happy Upgrading!

Cory

SharePoint Site Moves, Database Moves and Balancing Growth

coryburns — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:30:00 GMT

SharePoint adoption is at an all time high right now with the release of MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0, this is wonderful for your investment but can be a nightmare for a poorly planned deployment that was not ready for massive growth. Certain operational tasks may be on the horizon to better balance your content databases in regard to site size, database size and potentially even your SQL storage plan in general.

Site Moves are an important part of maintaining your SharePoint environment. Situations may arise where a site has outgrown other sites by a substantial amount. To help support this larger site in an intelligent manner we need to migrate it to its own database away from other site collections (Split). Additionally if you know that a site has the potential to grow substantially this would be a good idea as a proactive approach. We will refer to this action as splitting a site. Other situations can also warrant splitting sites out of a database such as your site max cap was set to high initially and now you have too many site collections in each database or for legal or business reasons you need to separate certain sites from other sites even at a database level.

Balancing Databases would be another action you may need to entertain to help gain control over your growth. This may be as simple as detaching a database from SQL and moving it to another LUN on your SQL instance or migration of the database to an entirely different SQL server, or as complex as load balancing your site creation between LUNS / SQL Servers.

Site Moves

To migrate a site collection from 1 database to another with control first we need to understand how SharePoint decides where a new site collection is created. SharePoint will place a new sitecollection into the content database with the largest delta between sitecount and sitemax. What does that mean exactly, lets look deeper.

As you can see above the delta for demo_content_1 is 500 – 3 (497) and the delta for demo_content_2 is 500. The larger the delta is determines where your site goes. The next site created will go into demo_content_2.

With that being said you now have the ability to migrate sites to the database of your choice. To perform this move you would simply do the following 3 commands.

stsadm -o backup -url http://demo/sites/test2 -filename e:\test2.bak

stsadm -o deletesite -url http://demo/sites/test2

stsadm -o restore -url http://demo/sites/test2 -filename e:\test2.bak

If we refresh the content database page we can see that our site has moved to demo_content_2.

Database Stripping

In the event that your site has grown beyond the limitations of stsadm (in our testing no more then 15GB) you may need to entertain the path of database stripping. For database stripping we would take a backup of the database that contains the larger site and attach it to a testing / restore environment. You would then use stsadm to delete all site collections except the larger site. This in effect has singled out your site collection into its own database. Then when you reattach that database to your production farm which contains this 1 site you want to set your site warning limit to 0 and site max to 1, thus to keep that 1 site separate into its own database.

Balancing Databases

To help increase performance and manageability you may want to at some point balance your content databases across multiple LUNS or even SQL servers. In the event you want to migrate your database to another LUN on the same SQL server instance I recommend the following steps.

- Inter SQL Server Database Move

First leave your database attached to your farm, there is no reason to detach your database from your SharePoint farm if your moving it inter SQL Server. Simple Detach the database from SQL and copy your .MDF and LDF to the share of your choice. Then reattach your database in SQL and perform an IIS reset on your SharePoint Front end. Also leaving your SharePoint Content database attached helps avoid orphan site collection creation.

- External SQL Server Database Move

Log Shipping Method(low impact)

To migrate your content database from 1 SQL Server to another there are a few choices, your choice will depend on how much downtime you are willing to take. First option being you can setup SQL Log shipping, Once your 2 databases are in sync you would do the following steps.

Stsadm –o deletecontentdb –url http://demo –databasename demo_content_1 –databaseserver SQLServerA

At this point you would perform the final cutover on your log shipped database to SQLServerB

Then finish with

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://demo –databasename demo_content_1 –databaseserver SQLServerB

Copy Method(high impact)

Your other option would be to simply detach the database from SQL and copy the .mdf and .ldf to the new SQL server. While in transit your users will get a generic “Cannot connect to content database” error when visiting their site. Following the copy you would perform the following on your web front end.

Stsadm –o deletecontentdb –url http://demo –databasename demo_content_1 –databaseserver SQLServerA

Stsadm –o addcontentdb –url http://demo –databasename demo_content_1 –databaseserver SQLServerB

Load Balancing Site Creation

Using the methods explained above we can in a sense load balance our site creation between content databases and SQL Servers. We can do this by creating multiple content databases across SQL LUNS and SQL Server instances.

Since site creation is based on delta it will create the next new site collection in demo_content_3 or demo_content_4. Once both of those databases reach a site count of 1 it will repeat the process against all 4 and so on. You will then always have +1 -1 Number of site collections between your content databases.

SharePoint PG pre-release of Community Kit for Sharepoint!

coryburns — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 05:17:00 GMT

The CKS:EBE was designed to enhance and extend the functionality of the built-in blog feature in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. By leveraging its innovative Modular Theme Framework (MTF), your blog can look nothing like a typical SharePoint blog while retaining the ease of use of the SharePoint blog’s built-in functionality. You can modify an existing theme or install a new one even if your blog is provided by an external SharePoint hoster or an internal IT department, and you only have Contributor level permissions. The EBE team’s motto is that your blog should look as smart or creative as you think you are. To read the whole article click Click Here!

Sharepoint Reporting Methods

coryburns — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 18:34:00 GMT

Reporting in SharePoint can be very helpful for all types of scenarios, storage growth projection, weekly service reviews, operational tracking for backups / restores and more. Below are a few scripts that I have wrote for MOSS 2007 / WSS3.0, These can be used to pull all kinds of good information that might not be available from the Front End(OM).

Please keep in mind that any direct database queries or modifications are not supported by any means. A suggestion might be to perform these against a test / backed up copy of your production data.

Content Script 1

The following script grabs all kinds of great data from your moss 2007 / WSS3.0 Content Database such as:

· SiteURL – Path for a site collection

· SiteAdmin – Site Owner / Admin for the site Collection

· RecycleBin – Amount of disk space RecycleBin is currently using

· BandwidthUsed – Amount of traffic the site has generated

· SiteSize – Amount of space the site takes up in the database

· SiteMaxQuota – Specific Max Quota the site has specified

· SiteID – Site GUID assigned for specific collection

· Content_DB – Database that site resides in

· ServerName – Server that Database Resides on

· LastContentChange – Last time a user modified any part of the site

· DaysSinceLastChange – Days Since last modification to site

Use <ContentDatabase>

select distinct a.fullurl as [SiteUrl],

b.tp_login as [SiteAdmin],

sum(cast(c.size as decimal))/1024/1024 as [recyclebin],

cast(d.bwused as decimal)/1024/1024 as [BandwidthUsed],

cast(d.diskused as decimal)/1024/1024 as [SiteSize],

cast(d.diskquota as decimal)/1024/1024 as [SiteMaxQuota],

d.id as [SiteID],(select db_name(dbid) from master..sysprocesses where spid=@@SPID) as [Content_DB],

(select @@servername) as [ServerName],

d.lastcontentchange as [LastContentChange],

(select datediff(day,d.lastcontentchange,current_timestamp)) as [DaysSinceLastChange]

from webs as a inner join

sites as d on a.siteid=d.id inner join

userinfo as b on a.siteid=b.tp_siteid left join

recyclebin as c on a.siteid=c.siteid where b.tp_siteadmin = '1' and a.parentwebid is null

group by a.fullurl, b.tp_login, d.diskused, d.id, d.bwused, d.diskquota, d.lastcontentchange

Order by a.fullurl

Configuration Script 1

The following script will create a high level snapshot of how your configuration database looks from a SQL standpoint. It would be run against your configuration database. It includes the following set of columns

· ConfigServer – Server your configuration database lives on

· Config_DB – Name of your configuration database

· Content_DB – Name of the content database that specific site lives in

· SiteID – Site GUID assigned for specific collection

· ServerName – Server where content database lives

· SiteURL – Full SiteUrl for each site collection in the Farm

Use <Configuration Database>

SELECT (Select @@servername) as [ConfigServer],

(select db_name(dbid) from master..sysprocesses where spid=@@SPID) AS [config_db], a.name as [content_db],c.id as [SiteID], b.name as [servername], 'http://'+d.name+c.path as [Siteurl]

from objects as a inner join

sitemap as c on a.id=c.databaseid inner join

objects as d on c.applicationid=d.id inner join

objects as F on a.parentid=f.id inner join

objects as b on f.parentid=b.id

where a.id in (select databaseid from sitecounts)

order by a.name

Content Script 2

The following script grabs lower level web information for your site collections including the following columns:

· ServerName - ServerName content database is located on

· Content_DB – Content Database web lives in

· SiteID – Site GUID assigned for specific collection

· WebID – Web GUID assigned for specific Web

· WebURL – URL for web

· ParentwebID – Relative GUID in which web is a child of ( Null = Site Collection )

· WebTemplate – Template Web was provisioned as

· Language – Language web was provisioned as

· ProductVersion – Version of site

· DocumentCount – Number of documents that live within web

select distinct(select @@servername) as [servername], (select db_name(dbid) from master..sysprocesses where spid=@@SPID) as [Content_db], a.siteid, a.id as [WebID], a.fullurl as [WebURL], a.parentwebid, a.webtemplate, a.language, a.productversion, count(b.id) as [DocumentCount]

from webs as a inner join

alldocs as b on a.siteid=b.siteid and a.id=b.webid

group by a.siteid, a.id, a.fullurl, a.parentwebid, a.webtemplate, a.language, a.productversion

order by a.fullurl

As you can see all 3 queries contain the site GUID, a content_db and a Servername… With that being said if you were to pull this data into a central repository you could then write SQL joins on those 3 columns and create all kinds of helpful views on your infrastructure. Additionally you can write SQL cursors around these scripts to pick up on table SCHEMA and loop through all of your content databases rather than manually executing on just one. The sky really is the limit. I will have an update to this with some example cursors and joins in the coming weeks.

Cory