Showing posts with label SP2013. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SP2013. Show all posts

Monday 22 July 2013

SharePoint 2013 Search Overview

Overview:  This post explains how SharePoint 2013 Search works.  SharePoint 2013 search is the latest search within the SP product and replaces SP and Fast search that was used with SP 2010.

6 Components:
  1. Query
  2. Index
  3. Analytics
  4. Content Processing
  5. Crawl
  6. Admin
Tip:  Group Query & Index roles on the same server.  Then group Analytics & Content processing.  Group Crawl & Admin (you can also add content processing to these servers).

Installing search on SP 2013 creates 4 database (all db's by default use the 'Simple' recovery model):
  1. Search Admin,
  2. Search analytics Reporting,
  3. Search Crawl, and
  4. Search Links.
A guideline from Microsoft is: "Add one index partition for every 10 million items in the search index."  This depends on how you are using search, so if you have more documents per index but have few queries or can live with longer response times or your kit can deal more queries this can be increase or decreased.
Index partitions are splitting the data vertically, so if you have 25 million search items and want less than 10 million per partition, you will need 3 index partitions on the 3 index servers.  You do not have redundancy, so if any index goes down your search is broken.  Index replicas as the name suggests is a copy.  I think of this as horizontal scaling.  So if you want HA on your 25 million item search farm, you need another 3 index (Replica) partitions.  You have 6 index servers.  Using index replicas will improve query results speed.

Search Architectures for SharePoint 2013 - From MS (Kavindra Palaraja out of his oit2013-model-sharepoint-search-architecture.pdf document).  This is not my diagram but it explains the components nicely.
Search Components in SharePoint 2013
Replicas and Index partitions explained are refereed to as Rows and Columns. 
Add a new Index partition when the number of documents in the index exceeds 30 million.

SharePoint 2013 supports 3 types of Crawls:
  1. Full (SP2010) 
  2. Incremental (SP2010) and
  3. Continuous.
  • The continuous crawl on works on SP2013 content and shall display content in the crawl results as soon as data has been crawled and run thru the content processing component (CPC) (it doesn't wait for the crawl to complete).  Note: security changes are only picked up after incremental search is run.  There are no crawl logs for continuous crawls, so for troubleshooting go to SQL Search Service DB for the table MSSMiniCrawls (verify).
  • "multiple continuous crawls can run at the same time. Therefore, even if one continuous crawl is processing a large content update, another continuous crawl can start at the predefined time interval and crawl other updates. Continuous crawls of a particular content repository can also occur while a full or incremental crawl is in progress for the same repository."  Technet 
  • It is a good idea to run incremental crawls as they index more data than just SP2013 data and continuous crawl does not process or retry items that return errors and the incremental crawl shall clean theses items up.
Tip: Results can also be security trimmed at Query time, this is FTC (Full Trust Code) that must be deployed on the query role search server on-prem.


More Info:
Capacity management and sizing overview for SharePoint Server 2013
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30383
http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=30374
SP2013 Stretch Farms
SP2013 Database types and desc

Design Goal - Index partitions and Index replicas.

Partitions marked in Red.

Note: 2016/11/16 - Adding email messages e.g. msg to SharePoint has always crawled the data however in MOSS and SP2010, the attachments do not get crawled.  SP2013 (it may be since SP1) and Office 365 will also index the attachments of messages saved in SharePoint.

Tuesday 6 November 2012

Prerequisites for SP2013 Offline Install

RE: http://autospsourcebuilder.codeplex.com/

Background: This is a codeplex project that will slipstream SharePoint 2013 & SP2010.  It flattens out the binary install files, gets the latest CU, language packs & pre-requisites.  This will then allow you to install SharePoint to the latest build pref using AutoSPInstaller.

Doing an Offline install is useful as most production environments don't allow internet access to download the pre-requisites.  It's also useful as you don't need to wait for the download on each server.  In my current scenario it's useful as I am building over 100 VM's in My DTAP environment and a lot of these are full CI daily rebuilds.

Overview:  I have been doing SP2013 installs using AutoSPInstaller and I have put this post together to help people use Bian Lalancette's (@brianlala) AutoSPInstaller tool. Pretty obvious but AutoSPInstaller is a great tool so use it or Gary Lapointe install scripts to automate SharePoint installations.  I have been using the tool to install 2013 and this post shows all the pre-requisites to SP2013 RTM for an offline install.

Findings:  There are 13 files I am downloading to install SP2013 without an Internet connection.  Brian Lalancette has a codeplex project that you should checkout, I hadn't seen it until today.
It helps build the slipstreamed images for SharePoint both 2010 and 2013 so you have a full patched version of binaries to run offline installs.
Add the prerequisites to "C:\Software\SP\SharePoint\PrerequisiteInstallerFiles"
List of Files to download for SP2013 RTM prerequisites:
  1. http://hotfixv4.microsoft.com/Windows%207/Windows%20Server2008%20R2%20SP1/sp2/Fix354400/7600/free/427087_intl_x64_zip.exe
  2. http://hotfixv4.microsoft.com/Windows%207/Windows%20Server2008%20R2%20SP1/sp2/Fix402568/7600/free/447698_intl_x64_zip.exe
  3. http://hotfixv4.microsoft.com/Windows%207/Windows%20Server2008%20R2%20SP1/sp2/Fix368051/7600/free/433385_intl_x64_zip.exe
  4. http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/1/3/9138773A-505D-43E2-AC08-9A77E1E0490B/1033/x64/sqlncli.msi (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=228086)
  5. http://download.microsoft.com/download/E/7/6/E76850B8-DA6E-4FF5-8CCE-A24FC513FD16/Windows6.1-KB2506143-x64.msu (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=233187)
  6. http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/a/4/ba4a7e71-2906-4b2d-a0e1-80cf16844f5f/dotnetfx45_full_x86_x64.exe (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=225702)
  7. http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/7/2/D72FD747-69B6-40B7-875B-C2B40A6B2BDD/Windows6.1-KB974405-x64.msu (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=226830)
  8. http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/1/D/01D06854-CA0C-46F1-ADBA-EBF86010DCC6/rtm/MicrosoftIdentityExtensions-64.msi (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=252368)
  9. http://download.microsoft.com/download/E/0/0/E0060D8F-2354-4871-9596-DC78538799CC/Synchronization.msi (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=224449)
  10. http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/6/7/A678AB47-496B-4907-B3D4-0A2D280A13C0/WindowsServerAppFabricSetup_x64.exe (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=235496)
  11. http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/B/5/7B51D8D1-20FD-4BF0-87C7-4714F5A1C313/AppFabric1.1-RTM-KB2671763-x64-ENU.exe (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=251471)
  12. http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/1/D/91DA8796-BE1D-46AF-8489-663AB7811517/setup_msipc_x64.msi (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219568)
  13. http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/F/9/8F93DBBD-896B-4760-AC81-646F61363A6D/WcfDataServices.exe (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=247921)

Files I add to my SP2013 binaries for an Offline install

Rather use the new tool "AutoSourceCodeBuilder"

My slipstreamed SharePoint 2013 binaries
 Update 07 November 2012: For my Windows 2008 R2 SP1 OS installation, the WCFDataServices.exe prerequisite will look for trusted certificates on the Server, if it can't find them it will try get them from the Internet.  I downloaded "Rootsupd.exe" (I'm not sure about support for "Update for Root Certificates For Windows XP [April 2012] (KB931125)" for my Windows 2008R2 SP1OS install from Microsoft).
The PowerShell to install the certificates is (this can be incorprated into your autobuild scripts if you need it or just run it (be warned there is not feedback on the install)):
PS> & "c:\rootsupd.exe"

Update 15 July 2013: Below are the latest pre-requisites I downloaded for SP2013 using AutoSPSourceBuilder.


Note:  I like to have a large disk for my c rive for the system files and also the Windows "page file", when calculating my disk space for my c drive assuming my page file is going to my c drive, I add 3 times the possible memort upgrade per machine.  So it is common to start with 32GB on a SQL box, when their is a bottleneck, it is often SQL and memory is key to SQL performance.  So my page file portion of my c drive would by on 64 GB multiplied by 3.  So My c drive in this case would be 64GM x3 plus program files, so at least 250 GB.  I'd probably go for 300GB.  this is my preference and I'm sure I'm going overkill but in controlled wel managed environments this will aloow for growth.

More Info:
WCFDataService install issue: http://schoennie.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/installing-sharepoint-2013-preview.html

Thursday 25 October 2012

Installing SharePoint 2013 RTM - a first look

Overview: I'm installing SharePoint 2013 for a developer machine, more precisely I'm using 2 virtual machines as I want AD off my development Virtual Machine (VM) (also Azure Workflows can't be installed on the DC). This is a basic developer machine and in this post I stop once SP2013 is installed.  My setup is: SharePoint 2013 logo

  • Laptop: 32GB RAM running Windows 8 Enterprise.  I am using VMware workstation 9 for virtualisation.
  • Virtualisation: VMware workstation 9 that will host 2 VM's.  Both VM's run on Windows 2008 R2 x64.  They are fully patched/updated to today 24 Oct 2012.
  • VM1:  This is my domain controller (DC), gave the VM a static IP and performed dcpromo. Installed ADFS and rebooted the VM.  Assign 1GB RAM & 1 CPU to the VM. 
  • VM2: Created a new machine based on my patched VM windows 2008 R2image.  Renamed the VM and joined the VM onto my domain (my domain is demo.dev, I also made the IP address static).  Checked the VM can connect to the Internet.  16GB RAM 4 virtual CPU's.  100GB c drive.  BGInfo for VM2 is shown below:

Preparation for SP2013 Install:
  1. Install SQL Server 2012 on VM2 I slipstreamed with #CU2 but the current version today is #CU4.  I manual full install of SQL 2012 is perfect.  As the Cumulative Updates (CU) are aggregated/cumulative and large, only install the latest 1 that covers all the previous CU fixes
  2. Download SharePoint 2013 from TechNet or MSDN to your laptop/host.  Load the iso image for installation (includes SP1 that is needed for SP2013).  .

SharePoint 2013 Prerequisites:
1.> Run the SharePoint 2013 Enterprise RTM by running "splash.hta" to run the install wizards.
2.> On the Splash screen >Click on "Install software prerequisites".  This installs the 11 prerequisites, reboot to complete the SP2013 prerequisites install.

3.> After a reboot, you will continue to complete the SP2013 prerequisite install.  Once the install is complete you will see the confirmation shown below:
4.> Click "Finish" and allow the VM to reboot.

SP2013 Installation:

1.> On the Splash installation screen click > "Install SharePoint Server".  You will be prompted to enter SharePoint's licence key.
2.> Accept Microsoft's terms and conditions.  And Choose to perform the "complete" install (As per SP2010 don't install the standalone version - it's too restrictive).
3.> Close the installation wizard once the install is completed.  Select the check box "Run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard now" (default).

Run the SharePoint 2013 Configuration Wizard:
Follow the screen shots below through to configure the SP2013 farm on the VM.







Initial Farm Config Wizard:
1.> Select the services you want.  I took the default services which is nearly all of them so it takes awhile to provision.
2.> Ensure the Central Administration (CA) portal is accessible.
3.> Create a Site Collection (I create a Team Site on the default Web Application created during the configuration setup).

4.> Ensure the site is working.

Fin.

Summary:
This machine is perfect for looking at SP2013 features or continue building into a fully fledged developer rig (Add VS2010 and tools to build an ideal dev VM rig).  This is a simple install to get you going, for production or DTAP, you need to plan your builds to meet your needs, use multiple managed accounts and preferably script your install (gives you a documented, repeatable system setup, databases can be named clearly, far greater install control.  I'd wait for Brian Lala AutoSPInstaller to build DTAP environments if possible - AutoSPInstaller is awesome as lots of SP2010 bruised folks know.)

More Info:
Hardware & Software requirements for SP2013: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485(v=office.15).aspx
How to: Set up an on-premises development environment for apps for SharePoint: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp179923(v=office.15).aspx
Must read: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30384
SP2013 Prerequisites

 

Wednesday 24 October 2012

SharePoint 2013 release on MSDN


SharePoint 2013 Enterprise edition is available to download through MSDN.  I was not expecting the release but on my MSDN Subscription is SharePoint 2013 for download.


All the Office 2013 products are also available.

I created a post documenting setting up SharePoint 2013 for dev/play.  This is a very basic install but shows the screens and a very simple easy setup.