Internet presence scenario: Plan the infrastructure

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

Important

This article is one of a series of articles that describes an end-to-end scenario that outlines how to plan, design, build, and maintain an enterprise's Internet presence Web site based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Previous article

Determine governance

Next article

Deploy the development and authoring environment

Beginning of scenario

Internet presence scenario (Office SharePoint Server 2007)

System architects can specify and cost the infrastructure requirements when the solution design, frequency of updates, IT service level, and operations level requirements are defined. Infrastructure includes the number of servers, the hardware and software that the servers must be running, and the required connections between the servers.

1. Gather business inputs to infrastructure requirements

Many factors that help determine infrastructure are specified during the solution design and business requirements phases. They include the following:

  • Purpose of solution, and data movement requirements.

  • Features used in solution, such as content deployment, and availability of Search.

  • Capacity requirements, such as number of users, corpus size, frequency of updates, and load on production site.

  • Performance requirements, such as times for page loads.

  • Governance agreements, such as recovery point and recovery time objectives and the backup schedules required to support them, availability requirements, and standard maintenance schedules.

Action

Gather all requirements in a spreadsheet.

Outcome

Single source of requirements information that can be analyzed.

Resources

2. Analyze existing infrastructure

The existing infrastructure of the system, and how much of it can be used in the new solution should also be analyzed.

Action

Analyze the existing infrastructure:

  • Environments

  • Storage

  • Software development

  • Offsite storage

  • Hardware

  • Software

Outcome

Description of known assets that can be compared to requirements.

Resources

System requirements

Existing environments

The existing infrastructure includes the following environments. For an overview of Internet-facing topologies, see Back-to-back perimeter topology with content publishing. For an overview of disaster recovery, see Data protection and recovery for Office SharePoint Server (White paper).

  • Internal The internal environment has a single forest and multiple domains. It is comprised of computers within a single datacenter.

  • Perimeter network The perimeter network is hosted within the same datacenter as the internal environment.

  • Failover The failover environment is part of the same forest and same domains as the internal site. It is comprised of computers within a single datacenter.

  • Disaster recovery location—local The local disaster recovery environment is a site within the region where images and backups are stored for quick reassembly.

  • Disaster recovery location—regional The regional disaster recovery environment is a site outside the region where images and backups are stored for quick reassembly.

Database storage

Currently, all databases are stored on direct-attached storage (DAS) devices.

Storage management

A separately-managed database administrator team manages all databases.

Software development processes and tools

The company has an existing development and test team that uses a software configuration management system and processes.

Offsite storage and recovery

The company has a vendor that provides backup storage, image storage, and recovery services both inside and out of the local region.

Hardware and software

The company’s base hardware and software for servers includes:

Component Description

Processor

2 3 GHz or faster processors

Memory

8 GB RAM

Disk space

500 GB

Operating system

Windows Server 2003, 64-bit

Database management system

Microsoft SQL Server 2005

3. Determine how to accommodate future plans

Within the next two fiscal years, the company plans to extend the Internet presence site in the following ways:

  • Add versions of the main pages in various languages.

  • Add access to an extranet environment for partners.

Both of these expansions will require additional development budget and infrastructure. The expansions are far enough in the future that buying equipment to support them now would be out of compliance with the company’s purchasing policy.

4. Finalize physical architecture

Given the requirements, finalize the plan for the physical architecture. These include the following:

Action

Compare the business requirements to capacity planning, redundancy, and availability planning recommendations.

Outcomes

Physical architecture diagrams that describe the following:

  • Number and locations of farms

  • Number and roles of servers within each farm

  • Hardware and software for each server type within a farm

  • Availability and failover mechanisms between the production and failover farms

Resources

Farm size decisions

Physical architecture

Solution architecture for Internet presence site

Farm Size and configuration Key drivers

Integration

Single server or virtual server

Ability to rebuild quickly

Authoring

2 front-end Web servers

Clustered database servers

Number of users

Number of unique visitors per day

Page load times

Required redundancy

Developer

Single server or virtual server

Ability to rebuild quickly

Production

3 front-end Web servers, 1 running queries

1 application server

clustered database servers

Number of users

Number of visits

Page load times

Required redundancy

Failover

3 front-end Web servers, 1 running queries

1 application server

clustered database servers

Number of users

Number of visits

Page load times

Required redundancy

Note

For this environment, the governance team determined that search results are not required to be highly available. In the event of a failover, a backup of the Search shared services provider (SSP) from the production farm will be restored to the failover farm.

Failover decisions

The Infrastructure team has decided to use Microsoft SQL Server 2005 mirroring for their failover farm. They reached this decision because:

  • The failover and production datacenters are within 1 millisecond latency of each other, and have 1 GB bandwidth.

  • No storage area network (SAN) is in use.

  • The database administration team is comfortable with SQL Server 2005 mirroring.

Authoring environment hardware and software decisions

Server role Specifications Key drivers

Clustered database servers

4 3 GHz or faster processors

16 GB RAM

15 GB hard drive (holds corpus: 1,000,000 10 KB documents)

Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition

SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition

Number of documents, number of queries, backup strategy, existing software in environment

2 Web servers, both front-end and query

Dual 3 GHz or faster processors

4 GB RAM

Available disk space to hold the index of at least .34 * the size of the corpus, plus room for the binary large object (BLOB) cache — approximately 20 MB.

Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition

Number of users

Number of visits

Page load times

Redundancy

Existing software in environment

Production environment hardware and software decisions

Server role Specifications Key drivers

Clustered database servers

4 3 GHz or faster processors

16 GB RAM

15 GB hard drive (holds corpus: 1,000,000 10 KB documents)

Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition

SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition

Number of documents, number of queries, backup strategy, existing software in environment

3 Web servers, both front-end and query

Dual 3 GHz or faster processors

4 GB RAM

Available disk space to hold the index of at least .34 * the size of the corpus, plus room for the BLOB cache — approximately 20 MB.

Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition

Number of users

Number of visits

Page load times

Redundancy

Existing software in environment

Index server

Dual 3 GHz or faster processors

4 GB RAM

Available disk space to hold the index of at least .34 * the size of the corpus

Number of users

Size of corpus

Frequency of change

Existing software in environment

Failover environment hardware and software decisions

The failover environment must be configured with the same number of computers and the same software and operating systems, and be at the same patching level as the production environment. This is so that you can switch to the failover environment by using SQL Server mirroring and SQL Server client aliasing. For more information, see Internet presence scenario: Configure the failover infrastructure.

Integration environment hardware and software decisions

Single server: 4 3 GHz or faster processors, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB disk space, Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition, SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition, , Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Developers.

Development hardware and software decisions

Single server. 4 3 GHz or faster processors, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB disk space, Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition, SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Developers.

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