www.vce.com
VBLOCK
™
SOLUTION FOR A VIRTUALIZED,
SCALABLE 50,000-USER MICROSOFT
SHAREPOINT 2010 DEPLOYMENT
Copyright 2013 VCE Company, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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Contents
Executive summary ... 5
Business case ... 5
Solution ... 5
Key results ... 5
Purpose and scope ... 6
Audience ... 6
Feedback ... 6
Technology overview ... 7
Vblock
™Systems ... 7
Vblock System 720 ... 7
Vblock System 320 ... 7
Vblock System 200 ... 8
Vblock System 100 ... 8
EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager ... 9
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Server ... 9
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 ... 10
VMware vSphere ... 10
VMware vSphere High Availability ... 10
VMware vCenter Chargeback ... 11
Solution architecture ... 12
Physical architecture ... 12
Logical architecture ... 14
Hardware and software ... 15
Design considerations ... 17
Disk layout ... 17
Content database ... 18
Unified Infrastructure Manager ... 18
SharePoint 2010 ... 19
Network ... 19
vSphere ... 20
SQL Server ... 20
Cisco Application Control Engine ... 21
Solution validation ... 22
Test design ... 22
Overview ... 22
HP LoadRunner ... 22
Data population ... 22
SharePoint 2010 user profiles ... 22
Maximum user capacity ... 23
User response times ... 23
Demonstrations ... 24
Test results and analysis ... 24
80% browse / 10% search / 10% modify ... 24
70% browse / 5% search / 25% modify ... 29
50% browse / 20% search / 30% modify ... 34
Executive summary
Business case
Microsoft Office SharePoint 2010 is critical for business collaboration in enterprise organizations, providing a consolidated, coherent approach to managing information assets and increasing
productivity. A well-designed and well-managed SharePoint deployment integrates easily with existing business applications to provide:
§ Content management § Business collaboration § Workflow processes § Business intelligence § Information access
SharePoint management, design, and implementation are difficult in traditional information technology (IT) environments. Organizations have to assemble physical servers that are expensive, underutilized, and difficult to manage—presenting exorbitant capital expenditure and operating expenditure
challenges to adoption. To provide performance, capacity, and availability during peak demands, IT departments over-subscribe physical systems, creating computing silos that cannot pool resources. As a result, some application services are over-served, while others are starved for resources, and performance suffers. Organizations need a more manageable solution to dynamically optimize resource use and maximize business responsiveness.
Solution
The Vblock™ Solution for A Virtualized, Scalable 50,000-user Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Deployment
describes a 50,000-user performance test of SharePoint 2010 on a Vblock™ System 300 to show how the components scale and share Microsoft and VCE best practices. This solution provides a dynamic enterprise-level private cloud solution for content management and collaboration with unified management, high availability, and easy scalability. VCE’s virtualized SharePoint solution represents a well-performing, enterprise-class SharePoint 2010 deployment that is cost-effective, scalable, and highly available. VCE technology and expertise ensure that the solution operates at maximum efficiency while being both manageable and sustainable.
Key results
§ The Vblock System 300 was an ideal platform for a virtualized SharePoint environment, providing excellent storage consolidation, performance, and flexibility—which previous distributed storage models do not support.
§ EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) allowed us to reduce provisioning times for the virtual machines and associated storage and network resources for SharePoint services and components from days to hours.
§ VMware vSphere High Availability (HA) eliminated the need to create Microsoft clusters, thus reducing the overall time required to build this solution from a day to a few hours.
§ We virtualized our SQL Server 2008 R2 with 50,000 users and experienced no reduction in performance.
Purpose and scope
This paper describes the design and testing of a large-scale SharePoint 2010 deployment in a virtualized, converged infrastructure that provides resource optimization and scalability, and ensures high availability, in a cost-effective and easy-to-manage package. We tested the solution for a diverse variety of enterprise organizations using different browse/search/modify ratios under load.
This solution architecture does not address low-level configuration, tuning, or maintenance.
Audience
This document is primarily intended for service architects, IT managers, and engineers considering an integrated, virtualized infrastructure with SharePoint content and collaboration applications and services.
Feedback
To suggest documentation changes and provide feedback on this paper, send e-mail to
Technology overview
This section summarizes technologies used in the solution.
Vblock
™Systems
The Vblock System from VCE is the world's most advanced converged infrastructure—one that optimizes infrastructure, lowers costs, secures the environment, simplifies management, speeds deployment, and promotes innovation. The Vblock System is designed as one architecture that spans the entire portfolio, includes best-in-class components, offers a single point of contact from initiation through support, and provides the industry's most robust range of configurations.
Vblock System 720
The Vblock System 720 is an enterprise, service provider class mission-critical system in the Vblock System 700 family, for the most demanding IT environments—supporting enterprise workloads and SLAs that run thousands of virtual machines and virtual desktops. It is architecturally designed to be modular, providing flexibility and choice of configurations based on demanding workloads. These workloads include business-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and database, messaging, and collaboration services. The Vblock System 720 leverages the industry’s best director-class fabric switch, the most advanced fabric based blade server, and the most trusted storage platform. The Vblock System 720 delivers greater configuration choices, 2X performance and scale from prior generations, flexible storage options, denser compute, five 9s of availability, and converged network and support for a new virtualization platform that accelerates time to service and reduces operations costs.
Vblock System 320
Vblock System 200
The Vblock System 200 is right-sized to meet the capacity, workload, and space requirements of mid-sized data centers and distributed enterprise remote offices. By leveraging the Vblock System 200, companies experience the repeatability, architecture standardization, implementation flexibility, and business results synonymous with Vblock Systems.
With pre-defined, variable configurations, the Vblock System 200 balances real workload requirements with fastest time to value, reducing risk and complexity. The Vblock System 200 is designed to:
§ Bring the power and benefits of the Vblock System family into a value-focused solution § Deliver core IT services (file/print and domain) for mid-sized data centers and distributed
enterprise remote locations
§ Provide development/test and co-location data center support
§ Efficiently handle mixed workload requirements for mid-sized data centers
§ Offer business applications with data segregation requirements (such as eDiscovery and eArchive) with predictable performance and operational characteristics
Vblock System 100
The Vblock System 100 is right-sized to meet the capacity, workload, and space requirements of mid-sized data centers and distributed enterprise remote offices. By leveraging the Vblock System 100, companies experience the repeatability, architecture standardization, and business results
synonymous with Vblock Systems.
With pre-defined fixed configurations, the Vblock System 100 is designed to:
§ Bring the power and benefits of the Vblock System family into a value-focused solution § Deliver core IT services (file/print and domain) for mid-sized data centers and distributed
enterprise remote locations in industries such as healthcare and advanced manufacturing § Offer dedicated local instance business application support including VDI, SharePoint, and
Exchange
EMC Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager
UIM provides simplified management for Vblock Systems by combining provisioning, as well as configuration, change, and compliance management. With UIM, management of the individual components in Vblock Systems can be combined into a single entity to reduce operational costs and ease the transition from physical to virtual to private cloud infrastructure. Centralizing provisioning, change, and compliance management across Vblock Systems reduces operating costs, ensures consistency, improves operational efficiency, and speeds deployment of new services for deployments such as SharePoint 2010.
Key features of UIM:
§ Manage Vblock Systems as a single entity § Integrate with enterprise management platforms
§ Consolidate views into all Vblock Systems components, including network, compute, and storage
§ Achieve system-wide compliance through policy-based management
§ Easily deploy hardware and software, VMware vSphere and infrastructure provisioning, and disaster recovery infrastructure
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Server
SharePoint 2010 is an industry-leading solution when it comes to promoting collaboration, managing documents, setting up Web sites to share information with others, and publishing reports to help everyone make better decisions—running on the Vblock Solution for SharePoint.
§ SharePoint 2010 sites provide a single infrastructure for all your business Web sites, enabling you to share documents with colleagues, manage projects with partners, and publish information to customers.
§ SharePoint 2010 Communities brings great collaboration tools—and a single platform to manage them, making it easier for people to share ideas and work together the way they want. § SharePoint 2010 makes content management easy by setting up compliance measures behind the scenes—with features like document types, retention policies, and automatic content sorting. § SharePoint 2010 Composites offers tools and components for creating do-it-yourself business
solutions. Business needs can be rapidly met by building no-code solutions.
§ SharePoint 2010 Insights provides access to information in databases, reports, and business applications.
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
SQL Server 2008 R2 is an industry-leading database solution with the performance and scalability to meet today’s IT challenges with a low total cost of ownership. SQL Server 2008 R2 contains
numerous business intelligence features from Microsoft that make it the ideal solution for the Vblock Solution for SharePoint:
§ PowerPivot allows you import, manipulate, and analyze and export data; and create reports with a familiar Excel interface.
§ Master Data Services allows you to organize data across multiple departments and silos. § SteamInsight allows parallel data processing to facilitate simultaneous queries on live data. § SQL Server Utility provides a single management dashboard across multiple servers and
databases.
VMware vSphere
vSphere 4.1, the industry’s most widely deployed virtualization platform, delivers the only foundation to transform data centers into dynamic, simplified infrastructures for private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. The most comprehensive set of unique capabilities for availability, security, resource optimization, and business continuity have established vSphere as the platform of choice for customers of any size. vSphere abstracts applications and information from the complexity of underlying infrastructure, creating internal cloud infrastructure so IT can focus on the support and enablement of business value. Key features of vSphere include:
§ Abstracts server processor, memory, storage, and networking resources into multiple virtual machines.
§ Partitions physical servers into multiple virtual machines. Each virtual machine represents a complete system with processors, memory, networking, storage, and BIOS.
§ Shares single server resources across multiple virtual machines and clusters ESXi servers for further sharing of resources.
§ Reduces costs and maximizes IT efficiency
§ Increased IT control through service level automation
VMware vSphere High Availability
vSphere HA provides uniform, cost-effective failover protection against hardware and operating system failures within the Vblock System to minimize downtime. Key features of vSphere HA include:
§ Automates monitoring of virtual machine availability and detects operating system failures within virtual machines
§ Automates the optimal placement of virtual machines restarted after server failure; requires VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
§ Supports up to 32 nodes in a cluster for high application availability and has the same limits for virtual machines per host, hosts per cluster, and virtual machines per cluster as vSphere § Continuously and intelligently monitors capacity utilization and reserves spare capacity for
restarting virtual machines
§ Identifies abnormal configuration settings detected within vSphere HA clusters
§ Reports relevant health status and potential error conditions and suggested remediation steps § Reduces downtime due to software error and hardware failure to support service level
agreements (SLA)
VMware vCenter Chargeback
vCenter Chargeback is an end-to-end cost-reporting solution for virtual environments that enables accurate cost measurement, analysis, and reporting of virtual machines using vSphere on a Vblock System. Virtual machine resource consumption data is collected from vCenter Server, ensuring the most complete and accurate tabulation of resource costs. Integration with VMware vCloud Director and VMware vShield also enables automated chargeback for private cloud environments.
You can use vCenter Chargeback with the Vblock Solution for SharePoint to meter CPU, memory, and storage utilization. This allows organizations to adopt a resource-based cost model in order to charge customers or internal departments, thus reducing total cost of ownership and improving return on investment. For more information about vCenter Chargeback, refer to Vblock Infrastructure
Platform—Guidelines for Metering and Chargeback using VMware vCenter Chargeback at www.vce.com. Key features of vCenter Chargeback include:
§ Integrates with vCloud Director, which enables automated chargeback for private cloud environments
§ Maps IT cost to business units, cost centers, or external consumers thereby enabling a better understanding of how much resources cost and what can be done to optimize resource utilization
§ Supports policy-driven accountability for self-service environments so that business owners can pay as they go for cloud resources
§ Supports allocation-based costing, utilization-based costing, or a combination of both to fit an organization’s unique costing policies
§ Allows users to base costs, fixed costs, onetime costs, multiple rate factors, and overage fees to model true costs
Solution architecture
Physical architecture
Logical architecture
We optimized server resources by creating an environment consisting of four vSphere servers. The environment contained the entire infrastructure required to operate a SharePoint 2010 deployment, including domain controllers, application servers, and web front ends. SharePoint Server 2010 uses SQL Server 2008 R2 as its database back end. Vblock Systems provide flexible, highly available storage while ensuring adequate performance to the entire SharePoint deployment. vSphere enables server consolidation through virtualization.
Hardware and software
The following tables list the hardware, virtual, and software resources used in the Vblock Solution for SharePoint:
Table 1. Hardware resources
Equipment Quantity Model/configuration
Storage array 1 VNX 5500
20 x 600GB SAS DISK RAID 5 20 x 600GB SAS DISK RAID 10
UCS with ESX host 4 UCS B200 Series
6-socket hex-core (12 cores) Xeon X5650 2.66 GHz, 96 GB RAM
Network switch 2 Nexus 5010
Fibre Channel switch 2 MDS 9148
Table 2. Virtual Resources
Virtual machine role Quantity Configuration
Web front end 6 4 virtual CPUs, 8 GB RAM
Application servers 2 2 virtual CPUs, 4 GB RAM
Crawl server 2 4 virtual CPUs, 8 GB RAM
Query server 2 4 virtual CPUs, 8 GB RAM
SQL Server 2 8 virtual CPUs, 32 GB RAM
Domain controllers 2 2 virtual CPUs, 4 GB RAM
Table 3. Software Resources
Software Version HP LoadRunner 11.0 Windows Server 2008 R2 SP2 SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2 SharePoint Server 2010 SP1 EMC PowerPath/VE 5.4 SP2
UIM Provisioning Center 2.1
Table 4. SharePoint 2010 resources
Item Quantity
SharePoint user data 1 TB
Concurrency 1%
Site collections 5
Sites per site collection 10
vSphere servers (physical) 4 nodes
SQL 2008 R2 servers (virtual machines) 2
Web front ends (virtual machines) 6
Application servers (virtual machines, also hosting
Central Admin) 2
SharePoint 2010 Crawl server (virtual machines) 2
Design considerations
Where applicable, we configured the SharePoint 2010 environment according to Microsoft and industry best standards.
Disk layout
The disk layout was based on Microsoft and EMC best practice recommendations. We used 200 GB for each SQL SharePoint 2010 content databases. We divided 1 TB of user data comprising
4,300,000 documents into 5 x 200 GB content databases on 280 GB volumes, which we spread across 20 x 600 GB disks using RAID 5 for redundancy. All virtual machines used the VNX 5500 for operating systems and content drives. We used RAID 1/0 LUNs (logical unit number) for the search and TempDB databases.
Table 5. Volume layout
Enclosure Thin type storage pool name
Disk number and type
RAID type Volumes
1_0_0 to
1_0_19 STP_SAS_R5 20 x 600 GB SAS
disks
R5 § SharePoint configuration databases
§ SQL system databases
§ DC, application, index and query OS § Index data
§ Content database logs
Content database
We designed the solution according to industry standards, as a publishing portal with 1 TB of user content comprising five SharePoint site collections (document centers). We populated each
SharePoint site with 200 GB of random user data to achieve optimal performance. This configuration was based on the Microsoft recommendation to use smaller LUN sizes to reduce latency.
The SharePoint content databases contained:
§ 200 GB data on 280 GB LUNs, which addressed the anticipated content database file growth caused by SQL rebuilds and SharePoint sprawl.
§ 50 GB log files on 100 GB LUNs, which addressed the anticipated rapid growth in database log files caused by modifications and binary large object uploads.
Other best practices we followed included:
§ Placing the TempDB databases on RAID 10 LUNs, as per SQL Server 2008 R2 best practices to achieve higher input/output operations per second (IOPS)
§ Placing the search databases (property store and crawl store) on RAID 1/0 LUNs to handle anticipated higher I/O operations
§ Allocating each of the search databases a 130 GB LUN, constituting 10% of the total content, in order to allow for growth
§ Placing the content databases on RAID 5 LUNs to handle anticipated lower I/O operations § Placing the crawl server index on RAID 5 LUNs because they only hold incremental data and
are therefore much smaller than in SharePoint 2007 implementations—typically only a few gigabytes for a 1 TB ContentDB
§ Reducing the content index files by partitioning the query server index across two RAID 5 LUNs, which allowed for better redundancy
Unified Infrastructure Manager
We used UIM to rapidly deploy and simplify creating the SharePoint systems and services virtualization platform on the ESX servers in the Vblock System using the following configurations:
§ Used UIM’s Service Offering Wizard to create a service offering on the UIM service catalog for storage on five ESX servers (UIM service offerings are capable of supporting up to ten servers). Service offerings are templates for services in the UIM service catalog, which collect compute, storage, and network information for Vblock Systems provisioning.
§ Created a new service based on this service offering by entering simple criteria for five ESX servers, each with 20 GB boot LUNs, hostnames, IP addresses, and virtual local area networks. § Used UIM to provision the service with a single-click operation, at which point we could reach all
SharePoint 2010
Previous SharePoint 2007 configurations only supported a single crawl server responsible for crawling and maintaining search content index files, which it then fully replicated to each query server. Content index metadata was stored in the Share Service Provider search database on the SQL Server, and disparities between these two index stores necessitated a full crawl of all content data. This exposed a significant single point of failure.
The current SharePoint 2010 configuration comprises a search server with a crawl server that crawls and populates the crawl and property stores on the SQL Server. These crawl servers no longer host the content index store—it is split between the query servers. Since the property store solely maintains the index content, the crawl server no longer needs to conduct a full crawl of the content data.
As a result, the crawl server requires very little space for caching—typically 500 MB instead of 5–30% of the user content size. For the Vblock Solution for SharePoint, we performed the following
configurations:
§ Used Office SharePoint Search Server service (OSearch) § Configured search with two crawl servers (formerly index servers) § Partitioned the search index for crawling across two query servers
§ Placed the SharePoint 2010 property store, used for incremental crawls and updates, on a dedicated RAID 1/0 LUN
§ Set incremental crawls to occur every 15 minutes
Network
For the Vblock Solution for SharePoint, we performed the following network configurations:
§ Adhered to Microsoft best practices for security and performance by using dedicated virtual local area networks and network interface cards
§ Created a distributed virtual switch in vSphere for public and private network configuration consistency across the SharePoint deployment
vSphere
For the Vblock Solution for SharePoint, we performed the following vSphere configurations: § Installed vSphere on four servers to host the farm virtual machines and distributed them as
evenly as possible across the four servers
§ Created a distributed switch for the public and private networks. We placed all virtual machine OS, application binary files, and swap files as VMDKs in data stores on Vblock Systems § Used raw devices for all data disks on the Vblock System to provide greater flexibility for use
with products such as Microsoft Clustering and EMC Replication Manager
§ Used a separate physical vCenter for farm virtual machine configuration and maintenance § Configured and enabled vSphere HA and VMware DRS
SQL Server
For the Vblock Solution for SharePoint, we performed the following SQL Server configurations: § Adhered to all Microsoft storage, SQL Server capacity planning, and configuration guidelines § Mirrored our configuration, content, and services databases in a virtualized SQL Server instance § Used 280 GB for each of two SQL SharePoint 2010 content databases to maximize SQL
performance
§ Used one database server for the internal SQL and SharePoint databases, including the search database and five content databases
§ Configured the second SQL Server as a mirror containing five additional content databases § Used two 100 GB temp databases and one 50 GB temp database log file for each SQL Server § Used 30 GB of a 100 GB LUN for the property store database and 28 GB of a 130 GB LUN for
the crawl store database
SharePoint
For the Vblock Solution for SharePoint, we performed the following SharePoint virtual machine configurations:
§ Allocated four virtual CPUs for each web front end virtual machine, because web front ends are CPU-intensive
§ Configured one application server as the central administration server and another one for general purposes, such as document conversions
§ Allocated four virtual CPUs for the crawl servers, because crawling is CPU-intensive
§ Configured the crawl servers to run a dedicated web front end role to improve crawl speed and to prevent the other web front ends from being affected by crawls
§ Used two query servers for searches
§ Mirrored both servers for fault-tolerance and performance
§ Optimized performance by using the SharePoint 2010 index partitioning scheme
Cisco Application Control Engine
Solution validation
Test design
Overview
We identified the steps required to design and implement an enterprise-level SharePoint solution on a Vblock System 300 and tested the solution using workloads generated by HP LoadRunner.
HP LoadRunner
HP LoadRunner software is the industry standard for performance testing. HP LoadRunner can emulate thousands of concurrent users to apply production workloads to application platforms or environments. LoadRunner stresses an application from end-to-end—applying consistent, measurable, and repeatable loads.
We used HP LoadRunner 11.0 to simulate real application load. We used HP LoadRunner to capture application response times, and we used other monitoring tools to monitor all levels of the
infrastructure. Testing comprised an HP LoadRunner Controller 11.0 and four load generators.
Data population
Our data population tool used a set of sample documents. We made each document unique by altering the document name and metadata prior to insertion.
To optimize efficiency, we used one load agent host for each web front end, allowing data to load in parallel until reaching a target of 1 TB = 4.3 million documents. We spread this data across five site collections, each collection being a unique content database.
SharePoint 2010 user profiles
The user profiles comprised a mix of three user operations: browse, search, and modify:
§ Browse: LoadRunner script simulates a user browsing a site until reaching an end document listing that contains no subpages.
§ Search: LoadRunner script simulates a user running a stored procedure in the SQL database to find a unique social security number, and then it performs a Web request to search for it.
We used three different browse/search/modify ratios to simulate different organizations’ varying use of these operations:
§ 80/10/10, which is typical for an organization with browsing and light collaboration
§ 70/5/25, which is typical for an organization with heavy collaboration but few search activities § 50/20/30, which is typical for an organization with heavy collaboration and search activities We used Application Control Engine load balancer to evenly distribute the incoming LoadRunner client load across the web front ends.
Maximum user capacity
All users adhered to a Microsoft Heavy User Profile, which specifies 60 requests per hour (RPH). We applied a think time of 0% to all tests, which eliminated typical user decision-making time when browsing, searching, or modifying with Office SharePoint server. Each user request is completed from start to finish without a pause, which generated a continuous system workload.
We derived the maximum user capacity with the following formula:
# Seconds per hour / RPH / Concurrency % x Requests per Second (RPS) § # Seconds per hour = 3600
§ RPH = 60 (Microsoft Heavy User Profile)
§ Concurrency = 1% (generally accepted standard)
§ RPS is based on the test results for each of the three profiles.
User response times
Table 6 lists Microsoft guidelines for acceptable user response times for SharePoint operations. Your business requirements may require longer or shorter response times than suggested, depending on the type of load and operations you choose to run.
Table 6. Acceptable user response times
Type of operation Example Acceptable user response time
Common Browse < 3 seconds
Common Search < 3 seconds
Demonstrations
In our testing, we demonstrated the following products in our solution:
§ UIM allowed us to reduce provisioning times for the virtual machines and associated storage and network resources for SharePoint services and components from days to hours. § vSphere HA eliminated the need to create Microsoft clusters, thus reducing the overall time
required to build this solution from a day to a few hours.
§ We virtualized our SQL Server 2008 R2 with 50,000 users and experienced no reduction in performance.
Test results and analysis
80% browse / 10% search / 10% modify
Tests passed per second
Figure 3.Tests passed per second
Time per operation
The Microsoft maximum recommended time for SharePoint operations is 3 seconds. The average time for all three operation types in our testing was well below this:
Figure 4. Response time by operation type
Figure 4 displays the average time taken to perform transactions during the load test. This graph demonstrates that the performance of the server is within acceptable and maximum transactions time ranges of 3 and 5 seconds respectively, as defined in User response times.
Average CPU utilization
Average CPU utilization for each server/server type was: § SQL-01: 55.28%
§ SQL-02: 39.11% § Web front ends: 73.70% § Query servers: 49.91% § Crawl servers: 28.59% 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 0:10 0:15 0:20 0:25 0:30 0:35 0:40 0:45 0:50 0:55 1:00 1:05 1:10 1:15 1:20 1:25
Response time (seconds)
Figure 5. CPU utilization
Using the 80/10/10 profile, the average CPU utilization for SQL, web front ends, query and crawl servers were all within our performance threshold of 80%.
Average and maximum input/output operations per second Average IOPS for operating systems, databases, and stores were:
§ Web front end OS: 55.69 § Content DBs: 102.86 § Property store: 26.87 § Crawl store: 42.35 § Temp DB: 80.25
Maximum IOPS for operating systems, databases, and stores were: § Web front end OS: 542.56
§ Content DBs: 145.83 § Property store: 231.651768 § Crawl store: 131.48 § Temp DB: 115.21 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 CPU utilization (%)
The IOPS we generated for the 80/10/10 profile was well below what the Vblock System 300 can support.
ESX server and virtual machine CPU and memory utilization
The following table shows ESX server and virtual machine CPU and memory utilization during test:
Table 7. ESX server and virtual machine CPU and memory utilization
Server/virtual machine Average CPU utilization (%) Average memory consumed (GB) ESX-1 79.82 55.88 App-01 54.74 25.45 WFE-01 54.04 20.22 WFE-02 54.64 20.06 SQL-01 65.36 17.64 ESX-2 42.14 22.76 APP-02 4.70 6.68 WFE-03 60.04 19.40 WFE-04 62.14 18.95 SQL-02 39.11 10.45 ESX-3 42.85 30.70 DC-01 2.38 3.67 WFE-05 59.14 19.36 CRAWL-01 24.14 10.53 QUERY-01 42.09 5.76 ESX-4 34.58 31.04 DC-02 3.55 2.79 WFE-06 59.31 18.39 CRAWL-02 .032 1.25 QUERY-02 40.59 6.17
70% browse / 5% search / 25% modify
Tests passed per second
This test simulated a typical profile for organizations with heavy collaboration, with a low ratio of search activities. The average number of tests passed per second was 8.34. Based on the methodology provided in Maximum user capacity, this solution supported 50,040 heavy users.
Time per operation
The Microsoft maximum recommended time for SharePoint operations is 3 seconds. The average time for all three operation types in our testing was well below this:
§ Browse: 0.45 seconds/operation § Search: 0.14 seconds/operation § Modify: 0.33 seconds/operation
Figure 7. Response time by operation type
Figure 7 displays the average time taken to perform transactions during the load test. This graph demonstrates that the performance of the server is within acceptable and maximum transactions time ranges of 3 and 5 seconds respectively, as defined in User response times.
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 0:10 0:15 0:20 0:25 0:30 0:35 0:40 0:45 0:50 0:55 1:00 1:05 1:10 1:15 1:20 1:25
Response time (seconds)
Average CPU utilization
Average CPU utilization for each server/server type was: § SQL-01: 37.21%
§ SQL-02: 20.54% § Web front ends: 66.34% § Query servers: 13.62% § Crawl servers: 7.63%
Figure 8 CPU utilization
Using the 70/5/25 profile, the average CPU utilization for SQL, web front ends, query and crawl servers were all within our performance threshold of 80%.
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 CPU utilization
Average and maximum input/output operations per second Average IOPS for operating systems, databases, and stores were:
§ Web front end OS: 121.33 § Content DBs: 116.32 § Property store: 20.32 § Crawl store: 35.65 § Temp DB: 85.26
Maximum IOPS for operating systems, databases, and stores were: § Web front end OS: 300.83
§ Content DBs: 185.86 § Property store: 105.41 § Crawl store: 114.72 § Temp DB: 103.34
The IOPS we generated for the 70/5/25 profile was well below what the Vblock System 300 can support.
ESX server and virtual machine CPU and memory utilization
The following table shows the ESX server and virtual machine CPU and memory utilization during testing:
Table 8. ESX server and virtual machine CPU and memory utilization
Server/virtual machine Average CPU utilization (%) Average memory consumed (GB) SQL-m2 20.54 3.25 ESX-3 26.56 30.75 DC-01 2.86 3.62 WFE-05 55.18 10.49 CRAWL-01 7.63 4.59 QUERY-01 13.62 4.80 ESX-4 24.20 31.14 DC-02 4.62 2.99 WFE-06 55.34 11.19 CRAWL-02 .396 1.35 QUERY-02 12.90 5.19
50% browse / 20% search / 30% modify
Tests passed per second
This test simulated a profile that is typical for an organization in which users perform both heavy collaboration and high ratio of search activities. The average number of tests passed per second was 9.35. Based on the methodology provided in Maximum user capacity, this solution supported 56,100 heavy users.
Figure 9. Tests passed per second 9.1 9.15 9.2 9.25 9.3 9.35 9.4 9.45 0:01 0:03 0:05 0:07 0:09 0:11 0:13 0:15 0:17 0:19 0:21 0:23 0:25 0:27 0:29 0:31 0:33 0:35 0:37 0:39 0:41 0:43 0:45 0:47 0:49 0:51 0:53 0:55 0:57 0:59
Time per operation
The Microsoft maximum recommended time for SharePoint operations is 3 seconds. The average time for all three operation types in our testing was well below this:
§ Browse: 0.55 seconds/operation § Search: 0.29 seconds/operation § Modify: 0.50 seconds/operation
Figure 10. Response time by operation type
Figure 10 displays the average time taken to perform transactions during the load test. This graph demonstrates that the performance of the server is within acceptable and maximum transactions time ranges of 3 and 5 seconds respectively, as defined in User response times.
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 0:10 0:15 0:20 0:25 0:30 0:35 0:40 0:45 0:50 0:55 1:00 1:05 1:10 1:15 1:20 1:25
Response time (seconds)
Average CPU utilization
Average CPU utilization for each server/server type was: § SQL-01: 42.22%
§ SQL-02: 25.16% § Web front ends: 66.67% § Query servers: 7.33% § Crawl servers: 4.45%
Figure 11. CPU utilization
Using the 50/20/30 profile, the average CPU utilization for SQL, web front ends, query and crawl servers were all within our performance threshold of 80%.
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 CPU utilization
Average and maximum input/output operations per second Average IOPS for operating systems, databases, and stores were:
§ Web front end OS: 105.54 § Content DBs: 153.25 § Property store: 28.12 § Crawl store: 42.65 § Temp DB: 74.52
Maximum IOPS for operating systems, databases, and stores were: § Web front end OS: 405.43
§ Content DBs: 145.31 § Property store: 186.74 § Crawl store —165.48 § Temp DB: 116.90
The IOPS we generated for the 50/20/30 profile was well below what the Vblock System 300 can support.
ESX server and virtual machine CPU and memory utilization
The following table shows the ESX server and virtual machine CPU and memory utilization during testing:
Table 9. ESX server and virtual machine CPU and memory utilization
Server/virtual machine Average CPU utilization (%) Average memory consumed (GB) WFE-04 65.73 13.54 SQL-02 25.16 4.35 ESX HOST 3 26.91 30.88 DC-01 2.87 3.46 WFE-05 66.03 12.28 CRAWL-01 4.16 4.63 QUERY-01 7.33 4.68 ESX HOST 4 25.93 31.25 DC-02 4.59 2.56 WFE-06 66.46 12.39 CRAWL-02 .39 1.51 QUERY-02 6.94 4.64
Conclusion
The increasing volume and importance of an organization’s knowledge assets mean that tools to manage content, collaboration, and information access are no longer an option—they are a business requirement. Whether working across teams to develop new products, implementing new processes, or managing internal and public-facing information, the Vblock Solution for SharePoint makes it easy and cost-effective for you to set up SharePoint in your organization.
VCE provides a comprehensive solution for a virtualized IT infrastructure that supports SharePoint without the traditional challenges of outdated technologies requiring long lead times and huge capital and operating outlays. The Vblock Solution for SharePoint provides a single enterprise-grade cloud solution, tailored for SharePoint, which provides economy, quality, and dependability in one package. This solution demonstrates a virtualized SharePoint environment that supports more than 50,000 users of varying profiles with reduced provisioning time. This solution provides faster return on investment and storage options that provide economy, performance, and scalability in one package. Vblock Systems offer an end-to-end IT infrastructure solution that clears the way for you to deploy SharePoint in your organization with reduced costs and simpler management.
Next steps
References
VCE
You can access the following VCE resource at www.vce.com
Vblock Infrastructure Platform—Guidelines for Metering and Chargeback using VMware vCenter Chargeback
EMC Powerlink
You need a Powerlink account access the following Unified Infrastructure Manager resources at
https://powerlink.emc.com:
§ Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Operations 2.1 Documentation Portfolio
§ Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Operations 2.1 Installation and Configuration Guide § Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Operations 2.1 Release Notes
§ Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Operations 2.1 Performance and Scalability Guidelines § Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Operations 2.1 Audit Log Messages Guide
§ Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Operations 2.1 Important Notice
§ Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Operations 2.1 Non-EMC Software Read Me § Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Operations 2.1 Online Help
§ Ionix Unified Infrastructure Manager/Operations 2.1 Open Source License and Copyright
Information for GPLv3 as Included with a Distribution of SLES 11
Microsoft TechNet
You can access the following Microsoft resources at http://technet.microsoft.com. § SharePoint Server 2010 Planning and Architecture
§ SharePoint Server 2010 Adoption Best Practices White Paper § Best Practices for SharePoint Server 2010
§ Troubleshooting SharePoint Server 2010
§ Hardware and Software Requirements for SQL 2008 R2 § SQL Server 2008 R2 Books Online
§ SQL Database Mirroring
ABOUT VCE
VCE, formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel, accelerates the adoption of converged infrastructure and cloud-based computing models that dramatically reduce the cost of IT while improving time to market for our customers. VCE, through the Vblock Systems, delivers the industry's only fully integrated and fully virtualized cloud infrastructure system. VCE
solutions are available through an extensive partner network, and cover horizontal applications, vertical industry offerings, and application development environments, allowing customers to focus on business innovation instead of integrating, validating, and managing IT infrastructure.
For more information, go to www.vce.com.
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