This is a live blogging post from the International SharePoint Conference London 2012. So don’t expect well-written proza here.
Session by Ben Curry & Wayne Ewington
Disk Subsystem
- isolate your workloads
- know what else runs on your storage subsystem
- sql really needs dedicated spindles
Disk Design
- anything under 20ms for the first write is unsupported
- use more smaller disks over fewer larger disks
- direct attached storage is generally the fastest
- don’t use virtual disks when virtualizing sql servers
- san is nice for snapshots
- say no to nas
- crawl database is by far the most demanding database
- try to separate search from the rest of the databases
- iops is the key requirement to gather
- you always need an array of disks to meet iops requirements
- raid 10 is the preferred config for service app databases
- 2000 iops is more or less the minimal for SharePoint service app databases
- initial capacity planning is more intuition than science
- on average, 2.2 versions per document is common
- on average, 220k per document is common
High Availability & Disaster Recovery
- ha is about rto, rpo - the business wants 0, but what is feasible?
- know the sql ha technologies
- clustering has only one copy of the data
- mirroring on transactions level, two copies of the data
- sharepoint is mirroring aware
- auto failover requires a witness server
- all databases are supported for mirroring, but not all are recommended (technet guidance on this is wrong)
- think hard on what problems you try to solve with remote blob storage before using it
- log shipping works with log backup/restore (one to many)
- you can combine clustering, mirroring and log shipping together!
- small rpo/rto: clustering & sync mirroring
- bigger rpo/rto: log shipping & backup/restore
Deployment
- use sql aliases
- database naming standards & no guids
- who creates your databases?