March 17th, 2011
by Tristan Watkins
In the last couple of weeks I’ve received notification of two important updates regarding Amazon Web Services. I thought I’d share them here, as they are both relevant to use of SharePoint 2010 on EC2 and I’ve seen no mention of them elsewhere. If you’re interested in this broader topic, I’ve covered it in detail here:
My commentary here assumes some familiarity with these earlier posts. This is new functionality that enables new design options. These options should make SharePoint 2010 on EC2 more appealing for a few specific uses.
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Consultancy and Design, Networking, SharePoint | 
8 Comments »
March 16th, 2011
by Tristan Watkins
My colleague Anthony Clegg and I have recently been working on a project together, for which I’ve designed and delivered the infrastructure, while he’s been delivering the solution. As part of my design, I extended the SharePoint Web Applications from the default HTTPS zones to new HTTP zones, exclusively for crawling. This approach has been around for some time, but there’s a new wrinkle on the SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search Centre People Search results page, which I’ll discuss here:
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Consultancy and Design, Performance, SharePoint | 4 Comments »
December 6th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
I’ve recently been involved in a somewhat unusual client engagement, in that I was designing and delivering the infrastructure without knowing the shape of the IA or solution architecture. Obviously, this imposed some restrictions on what we could define, but it also meant that I had to handle some aspects of the engagement that would normally be taken care of by other colleagues. To that end, I suppose some of these considerations aren’t purely infrastructure-specific, but they could be in an engagement like this one and they’re things that infrastructure people should understand. Hopefully it’ll be useful for solutions people as well.
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Client applications, Consultancy and Design, Performance, Security, SharePoint | No Comments »
November 29th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
In the previous posts in this series I’ve discussed the AWS platform and took a closer look at storage, snapshots and provisioning, looked at networking and cloning and then reviewed administration, delegation and licensing. In this post I will analyse cost, which is probably the most important factor when considering a move to the cloud.
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Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Windows | 10 Comments »
November 26th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
In the first part of this series on SharePoint 2010 infrastructure considerations for Amazon EC2, I introduced the AWS platform and took a closer look at storage, snapshots and provisioning. In the second post I moved on to networking and cloning. In this third post I will discuss administration, delegation and licensing.
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Consultancy and Design, Networking, SharePoint, Windows | 5 Comments »
November 25th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
In my previous post I introduced some of the peculiarities of designing SharePoint 2010 environments for Amazon’s EC2, specifically focused on the AWS platform, storage, snapshots and provisioning. In this post I continue this exploration, moving on to cloning and networking considerations.
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Consultancy and Design, Networking, SharePoint, Windows | 7 Comments »
November 24th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) have been around for a while now but there’s been surprisingly little use or abuse in the SharePoint community, from what I’ve seen. A notable exception to this is Andrew Woodward’s novel and interesting approach to Exchange BPOS migration via Amazon EC2. But that doesn’t talk much about SharePoint on Amazon, so in these posts I’ll give an introduction to the design constraints that pertain to SharePoint 2010 development environments on EC2. Even if the Amazon Web Services aren’t appealing, a lot of the issues discussed here will apply to consumption of other Pay-As-You-Go infrastructure services, presumably including the forthcoming Windows Azure VM role AKA Hyper-V Cloud. In this first post I focus on the platform, storage, snapshots and provisioning.
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Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Windows | 7 Comments »
April 21st, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
To understand the development environment design choices that this article pertains to, it may be worth glancing at the design section of my SharePoint development series before diving in, if you haven’t already followed those posts.
Cloning isolated VMs vs. scripted installation
One of the challenges we’ve always faced with SharePoint development has been the tension between cloning actually identical environments versus automating the deployment across distinct environments (or worse, repeating the installation manually). In the first case we save time by eliminating reconfiguration and this ensures a consistent experience for each user. This is particularly beneficial for software development. These benefits can also be obtained by scripting installation/configuration/deployment but there’s a considerable overhead associated with developing and testing those scripts. As SharePoint 2010 is still quite new and we’ve been working on projects for some time now, we didn’t have the luxury of waiting for those refinements and we needed to take advantage of these efficiencies as we had done with SharePoint 2007 projects.
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Consultancy and Design, Networking, SharePoint, Virtualisation | 2 Comments »
March 29th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
With SharePoint 2010 RTM looming, I’ve stumbled across an architectural change that may surprise some people – namely, that SharePoint 2010 no longer supports multiple-server farms without a domain infrastructure. In SharePoint 2007 it was possible to create SharePoint farms in a Workgroup, so long as all of the user accounts for the services and application pool identities were named the same and had the same password. You could even manage users with an Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) or Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) LDAP directory (albeit with some fairly limiting restrictions). However, it was possible to use these farms for testing or when an Active Directory infrastructure was undesirable (as some people see it in a DMZ). Now, it is still possible to do a Simple installation on a single server without full domain services, but it is no longer supported on multiple servers, and the Simple installation comes with its own planning considerations, to which I’ll return in a bit. First, there’s another wrinkle regarding the single server Complete installation.
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Consultancy and Design, SharePoint, Virtualisation, Windows | 13 Comments »
February 9th, 2010
by Tristan Watkins
I’ve recently been involved in MOSS 2007 farm topology discussions with a client that was interested in using the Split back-to-back topology. After a lengthy troubleshooting and escalation process we’ve identified some problems with this TechNet extranet farm topology guidance in conjunction with Microsoft Tier 2 support. In short, the TechNet document identifies some supported topologies that span domains, but this incident has raised questions about:
- The acceptable placement of server roles in those topologies.
- Supported domain trust directions.
- Alternate Access Mappings requirements.
- Picking people from other domains.
This is an account of the relevant issues and the steps that we took to reach our conclusions. read more »
Authentication, Consultancy and Design, SharePoint | 3 Comments »
