TechEd 2009 Day 2 – Part I

Well, today seems to be almost about security for me. I have decided to see five sessions and the four of those are about security.

The first session was an introduction to what Microsoft refers to as Business Ready Security. Business Ready Securiy as all about shifting the perception of security from being blocking, expensive, and limiting to being enabling and value-adding. The point being that if users can securely access the network from anywhere, she will become more effective and productive. Using the right mindset and – obviously products – the infrastructure will become simpler to deploy, easier to manage, and cheaper to use. As an example the ForeFront security suite is part of the Enterprise CAL which roughly cost $225/user and building the same funktionality with third party products will according to the marketing slide cost up to $775, and the Enterprise CAL even includes SharePoint and Exchange!

My second session was about the new Unified Access Gateway – the UAG. There are two egde firewall about to be released (bort are currently in RC0): Forefront Threat Managemet Gateway is the next version of ISA Server 2006 and Unified Access Gateway is the next version of Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 (IAG).

Besides general product improvement, Microsoft is really puching DirectAccess which is a core feature of Windows Server 2008 R2 and supported by TMG and UAG. From the demoes is looks really cool as it enables users to get access to everything from anywhere. It is slightly comploicated to set up since it seems to being relying heavily on IPv6 and certificates, IPv6 internet access is not available in many places, IPv6 to IPv4 translations must be enabled as well.

The third session is about to start. It is a 30 minutes product demo about end-to-end security using the Forefront suite. Should be good fun!

TechEd 2009 Day 1 – Part II

Joel and Todd saved the day!

As expected, Joel Olesons session was almost as good as hoped and it definitely saved the day. Joel invited his good friend, Todd Klint, to join him and the co-presented the session. Todd is co-author of the best SharePoint book published in 2009, Inside SharePoint 2007 Administration and is a die-hard SharePoint administrator.

 Together they make a great team and it is obvious that they enjoy talking about this stuff. The session itself was in the Database Track and as purpose to bring SQL DBA’s and SharePoint administrators closer together by bringing some of the pitfalls and challenges out in the light.

I will not go into details about the session itself as I expect Joel will publish the slides at some point. However, as I have recently blogged about, it is commonly perceived as best practices to limit the content databases to 100GB. When talking about how this limit was established, Joel kind of hinted that is was because the backup tapes used by Microsoft IT in those days could only contain 100GB of data and that MSIT had found that restoring backups spanding multiple tapes had proved difficult and often failed

The key note was unfortunately a huge disappointment and we left after 30 minutes as did MANY others as well. It seemed unnecessary to invite three customers on stage to do an interview session of their challenges. It made no sense to me! I was expecting insights and thoughts about the strategy, product announcements and stuff like that. Maybe all that was covered later in the key note and I missed it. I guess I’ll never know.

I am hoping for more quality in tomorrows sessions and with the sessions lined up, I am feeling confident that quality will be delivered!

TechEd 2009 Day 1 – Part I

For the first time in years, if not for the first time ever, the TechEd event is being held as one event where IT Pro’s and Developers are participating in the same conference. I am not totally convinced it a good idea as it seems to have a bad influence on the event selection. Very few level 400 events and only a handful or so level 300 events.

On top of that the event is starting Monday at 9AM and not Monday at 2PM which had the unfortunate effect that 5000+ people trying to check in between 8.30 and 9AM. I was naturally on of those 5000+ people so I missed the first 30 minutes of the first session. Luckily it was just a simple SharePoint 2010 overview session which was marketing/demos and it didn’t really reveal anything of interesting besides the presenter ran on a newer version of SharePoint 2010 that looked more stable and more finished than the version I have access to.

Still feeling grumpy from the 40 minutes queuing I decided to skip the following SharePoint 2010 session for IT Pros assuming it would also be marketing/demos and I went for a session called “Useful hacker techniques: Which part of hacker’s knowledge will help you as an IT administrator”. That was an unfortunately selected title to say the least. Although the presenter, a polish girl, had one or two good points, the rest was a complete waste of time. The most embarrassing moment was when she showed that the evil guys could replace a service executable on a server if they 1) had access to the box, and 2) had full permissions on the folder where the executable is located … Geez …

Anyway, the next session is by Joel Oleson, and I know he won’t disappoint

October 2009 Cumulative Update Packages available

The product team announced the availability of the October 2009 Cumulative Update Packages for SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. More information here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/29/october-2009-cumulative-update-packages-for-sharepoint-server-2007-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0.aspx

Getting geared up for TechEd!

Yep, it’s almost that time of the year! TechEd Europe is around the corner and the session list is beginning to take form. A month or so ago, I wasn’t to impressed with the sessions but since that at lot of exiting stuff has been added.

A lot of SharePoint 2010 sessions is on my list as is Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server sessions. I am happy that some of the great speakers are back once again. Todd Klint, Shane Young, and Joel Oleson are expected to delight and deliver as usual! My old-time favourite, Corey Hynes, is only hosting one session this year – but I am sure he’ll jump right in should Jeff Woolsey go missing as it happened last year

However, I am especially disappointed that Steve Riley and Jesper Johansson is sitting this one out as their particular sessions were always of very high quality. Maybe next year, guys?

SharePoint 2010 NDA lifted!

Let the bragging blogging begin

I have had access to the SharePoint 2010 Beta 1 bits since July through our partner agreement at work. I will not start listing all the new things that are coming. Joel has a great summary that you might want to check out. However, I must admit I am impressed with the overall quality of the product, and even though a lot of stuff still doesn’t work, what does work is fan-%”¤%(%”-tastic!

ProActive is already implementing our first SharePoint 2010 solution. We are planning to go live 2-3 weeks after Beta 2 is available depending on the changes. Our solution is a Intranet/Document Management system and I will share our findings in the coming days, more specifically

• the term store and shared metadata and content types
• unique document IDs
• document sets
• etc

SharePoint and very large databases

I got a very interesting call from a colleague the other day. He had a customer with content database which apparently was approaching 1TB! My colleague of course told the customer that it was not aligned with best practices and that it could cause problems down the road to which the customer replied with a smile: “Well, if that happens we just throw additional resources at the SQL Server. Thanks for playing, now leave me alone”

So, he called me:  ”Does it sounds plausible? SQL Server 2005/2008 can support exabytes of data so what’s the problem?”

Well, I went to work and starting digging up some information. My main bibles SharePoint 2007 Best Practices and Inside SharePoint 2007 Administration both referred to Microsoft guidelines which recommend to limit the content databases to 100GB:

Limit content database size to enhance manageability

Plan for database sizing that will enhance manageability and performance of your environment.

• In most circumstances, to enhance the performance of Office SharePoint Server 2007, we discourage the use of content databases larger than 100 GB. If your design requires a database larger than 100 GB, follow the guidance below: 
  • Use a single site collection for the data. 
  • Use a differential backup solution, such as SQL Server 2005 or Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager, rather than the built-in backup and recovery tools. 
  • Test the server that is running SQL Server 2005 and the I/O subsystem before moving to a solution that depends on a 100-GB content database. 
• Whenever possible, we strongly advise that you split content from a site collection that is approaching 100 GB into a new site collection in a separate content database to avoid performance or manageability issues. 
• Limit content databases that contain multiple site collections to approximately 100 GB.

However, the recommendations didn’t say anything about why 100GB is the magic number. MVP Ben Curry even at one point said “100GB doesn’t seem very big anymore If you need larger site collections, optimize SQL and rock on… “ 7-8 month later, Ben had thought it over once again and had come to another conclusion: “So, use your head when architecting databases/site collections and don’t smoke crack. I’ve even said you can have monster content databases in the past – I was wrong. The only way I would now architect large content databases would be for fairly static data that did not have a large collaborative user population.”

OK, so why is Ben advising us not to smoke crack? In other words, why are large content databases evil?

Obviously large databases makes it difficult to administer the databases and to maintain a realistic back/recovery plan due to the sheer amount of data:

• backup and restore take a long time (normally 150GB can be backed up in a 4 hour window)
• the SLA may be in jeopardy
• it is difficult to periodically test and verify the backup/restore procedure
• database attach is slow 
• upgrading WSS/MOSS service packs will be slow
• I am sure some custom code start to suffer as well

Note: the backup/restore timing issues normally doesn’t apply to those customers using SQL Mirroring or SQL log shipping.

Additionally – and probably at least as important: more data will lead to more SQL I/O which again lead to more locking and blocking on the SQL Server backend. All data in a site collection share the same table and if that table is blocked, access to all sites in the site collection is blocked! It is a normal SQL Server thing and as such it is not even visible in the event or trace logs.

Splitting up the content database can help overcome most of these problems and it is fortunately a relative simple thing to do. Here’s how to do it on WSS and MOSS.

A couple of infrastructure related anouncements …

Windows Virtual PC

Windows Virtual PC has RTM’ed and is available on technet. I would expect it do be available on MS Update / Download soon as well: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/10/07/windows-virtual-pc-and-windows-xp-mode-now-on-msdn-technet.aspx

Support changes for Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 July 2010

Extended support will end for Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 will move to extended support: http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2009/09/15/support-changes-coming-july-2010-for-windows-2000-server-and-windows-server-2003.aspx

Forefront Threat Management Gateway reaches the Release Candidate state

The product team announced that the RC version od the next version of ISA Server / Intelligent Application Gateway (IAG) 2007 firewall products is available for download: http://blogs.technet.com/isablog/archive/2009/10/11/forefront-threat-management-gateway-2010-release-candidate-now-available.aspx

SharePint thursday Oktober 8

The next SharePint event in Copenhagen in being held at Rosie McGees at 5PM this coming thursday.

Windows 7 available on MSDN!

Get it while it is hot