EMC Business Continuity for Microsoft SharePoint Server (MOSS 2007) Enabled by EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 4500 and EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) Reference Architecture EMC Global Solutions 42 South Street Hopkinton, MA 01748-9103 1-508-435-1000 www.emc.com
Copyright and Trademark Information Copyright 2009 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published March, 2009 EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. Benchmark results are highly dependent upon workload, specific application requirements, and system design and implementation. Relative system performance will vary as a result of these and other factors. Therefore, this workload should not be used as a substitute for a specific customer application benchmark when critical capacity planning and/or product evaluation decisions are contemplated. All performance data contained in this report was obtained in a rigorously controlled environment. Results obtained in other operating environments may vary significantly. EMC Corporation does not warrant or represent that a user can or will achieve similar performance expressed in transactions per minute. No warranty of system performance or price/performance is expressed or implied in this document. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Part number: H5979.1 2
Contents About this Solution Purpose...4 The business challenge...4 The technology solution...4 Solution details...5 Environment profile...8 Conclusion...12 3
About this Solution Purpose This document describes the reference architecture of the EMC Business Continuity for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS 2007) enabled by EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 4500 and EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF ) solution, tested and validated by EMC Global Solutions. The solution demonstrates a highly available, well-performing design for a MOSS 2007 server farm utilizing large, active databases protected by SRDF on the EMC Symmetrix storage system. The key purpose of this reference architecture is to lay the groundwork for a remote storage replication solution for disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity in your MOSS 2007 environment. More specifically, SRDF replicates data to a remote site while simultaneously making SharePoint applications available to users within minutes of a failure. The business challenge The technology solution In today's fast-paced business organizations, huge volumes of unstructured content are created on a daily basis. This unstructured content includes documents, e-mail, video files, and web pages. It is often in an unmanaged state and prevents organizations from using the content for information sharing and increased efficiency. Many organizations turn to SharePoint Server to solve this problem. As SharePoint becomes an integral part of organizations information infrastructure, the need to protect the application becomes increasingly urgent. EMC meets the business challenge for SharePoint 2007 continuity by providing the reference architecture for a highly available MOSS farm using Symmetrix DMX shared storage in both local and dispersed data centers. The technology solution presented here integrates Symmetrix storage and SRDF technology to support SharePoint performance and availability over short and long distances. 4
Solution details For example, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server represents a world-class enterprise portal platform that makes it easy to build and maintain portal sites for every aspect of a business. By using portals, organizations can streamline processes and transactions, increase employee productivity, and strengthen relationships with customers and partners. This solution demonstrates how EMC Symmetrix storage products and utilities help organizations: Manage diverse content and streamline business processes Provide enterprise scalability and document collaboration Enable affordable, uniform high availability across an environment Ensure a more effective, streamlined method of handling growing volumes of data Limit impact on server resources and networks Protect the Microsoft Office SharePoint farm from a site disaster Solution details This section briefly describes the key solution components. For details about all of the components that make up the solution, see Hardware resources on page 10, and Software resources on page 10. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 failover clustering Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Failover clustering for the solution is implemented using Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS). When services are down or fail, business continuity is interrupted, which can result in significant losses. Failover clustering in Windows Server 2008 helps ensure that the mission-critical applications and services, such as Microsoft SQL Server service, MSDTC and other clustered aware applications, are available when one or more nodes fail. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 is a new server program that is part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. MOSS 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities, which provides a single, integrated location, helps improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information sharing across boundaries. 5
About this Solution Microsoft SQL Server 2005 EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 Series Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is a comprehensive, integrated data management and analysis software that enables organizations to reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run today s increasingly complex business applications. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 allows companies to gain greater insight from their business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage. EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 enables you to manage and protect all of your data more than 1 petabyte of storage and keep it available at all times. Symmetrix DMX-4 provides customized Flash drives that break the performance barriers of traditional disk technology because they are optimized to meet high-end storage requirements. DMX-4 also delivers built-in RSA security technology to keep your critical data safe, as well as high availability to ensure constant data access. Best of all, the DMX-4 is energy efficient and easy to manage. EMC SRDF EMC SRDF is the most powerful suite of remote storage replication solutions available for DR and business continuity. Fully leveraging the industry-leading high-end Symmetrix hardware architecture, it offers unmatched deployment flexibility and massive deployment scalability to deliver a wide range of distance replication capabilities. The field-proven SRDF family is the most widely deployed set of high-end replication solutions, with tens of thousands of installations in the most demanding environments. The SRDF family can provide cross-volume and storage system consistency, tight integration with industry-leading applications, and simplified usage through automated management. 6
Solution details Physical architecture Figure 1 illustrates the overall architecture of the solution. Figure 1 SharePoint 2007 environment enabled by EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 4500 and EMC SRDF 7
About this Solution Environment profile This solution demonstrates a MOSS 2007 server farm designed for document collaboration. The solution is scaled at an enterprise level and uses a three-tier web application architecture. Boot from SAN Web server tier For this solution, the entire SharePoint farm (including SQL Server clusters, the MOSS 2007 Index server, and all WFE servers) use the boot from storage area network (SAN) technology. Applying boot from SAN ensures full site disaster recovery for your environment. Boot from SAN is a remote boot technology. The source of the boot disk resides on the SAN. The server communicates with the SAN through the host bus adapter (HBA). The HBA BIOS contains the instructions that enable the server to find the boot disk on the SAN. Boot from SAN is comparable to LAN-based remote boot, and offers the following advantages: Reduced equipment costs Reduced server maintenance Increased security Increased performance The first tier handles connections to the web portal and consists of several web servers, or web front ends. The web front ends serve the web pages that constitute the portal. These pages provide access to documents and collaboration features. The web front ends are presented to users through a content services switch or another method of network load balancing. The web server tier also provides query services that generate results for searches initiated by the web front ends. Each web server has a local copy of the search index maintained by the indexing service. If a web server were to fail, search services would still be available from the other web servers. In the solution as validated, activity on the web front ends is load balanced by a network load balancer. The load balancer allocates users across eight web servers using a round-robin policy. 8
Environment profile Application server tier The second tier is an application server tier that consists of one application server. This server hosts central administration, Microsoft Excel calculation services, and a content indexing service. The indexing service parses new content and updates the query database on the web front ends. Database tier Replication The third tier is a database tier. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 databases store both content and MOSS 2007 server farm management databases such as the configuration database and the metadata database supporting the search capabilities. The servers in this tier are configured as two failover clusters. Each cluster is a two-node active/passive cluster, which offers the greatest level of high availability. In the solution as validated, the document content resides in 25 content databases distributed across the two clusters. Collectively, the clusters host 5 TB of document content (the equivalent of more than 22 million documents) of the following document types: DOC, DOCX, GIF, JPG, MPP, PPT, PPTX, VSD, XLS, and XLSX. All three tiers are replicated in a remote location. The server operating disks are replicated as well as all of the farm content. The data may be replicated synchronously as well as asynchronously depending on your RTO service level agreements. The SAN switches from each site are connected by a TCP/IP link that serves to transfer all replicated content. Since all of the data is at the remote location, rapid recovery from a site disaster is as simple as starting the servers in the other location. Using total replication enables minimum service interruption. This solution has been validated with synchronous replication at 200 kilometers. It has also been validated with asynchronous replication at distances of 2,000 km and 4,000 km. 9
Environment profile Hardware resources Table 1 Table 1 lists the hardware resources used to validate the solution. Each site requires the same hardware. Hardware Equipment Quantity Configuration Web front-end server 8 Intel-based server, 2 dual-core CPUs, 3.0 GHz, 4 GB RAM Application server 1 Intel-based server, 4 dual-core CPUs, 3.0 GHz, 32 GB RAM Database server 4 Two MSCS clusters Active nodes: Intel-based server, 4 dual-core CPUs, 3.0 GHz, 32 GB RAM Passive nodes: Intel-based server, 4 CPUs, 2.4 GHz, 8 GB RAM Network switch 1 Gigabit Ethernet LAN switch Content services switch 1 Gigabit Ethernet load balancer SAN 1 4Gb/s Fibre Channel switches Storage array 1 EMC DMX-4 4500 series array with Enginuity TM (version 5773.79.58) Software resources Table 2 Table 2 lists the software resources used to validate the solution. Each site requires the same software applications. Software Software Version Configuration Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition SP1 64-bit Installed on web front-end servers, application servers, and database servers Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition SP2 64-bit Installed on database servers Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 SP1 64-bit Installed on web front-end servers and application servers EMC Solutions Enabler 6.3.2.0 Installed on application servers and database servers EMC PowerPath 5.1.1 Installed on application servers and database servers EMC Symmetrix Management Console 6.1.1.3 Installed on a web server 10
About this Solution Workload profiles Table 3 The Windows SharePoint services throughput is measured in transactions per second. These transactions-per-second measurements can be converted to the total number of users using a model of typical end-user behavior. During validation, 10 percent concurrency and the Heavy workload profile in the Windows SharePoint services models were used to determine the maximum user count that the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 server farm could sustain while ensuring that average response times remained within acceptable limits. Microsoft standards state that a heavy user performs 60 requests per hour, that is, a request every 60 seconds. Each response per second of throughput supports 60 simultaneous users (equal to 24,000 requests per second). Table 3 lists the acceptable limits for MOSS 2007 user operations. Acceptable user response times Type of operation Example Acceptable user response time Common Browse < 3 seconds Common Search < 3 seconds Uncommon Modify < 5 seconds 11
Conclusion Conclusion Summary of benefits This reference architecture depicts a validated MOSS 2007 data protection solution that grew out of the need for continuous access to SharePoint 2007 applications. This solution proves that combining EMC Symmetrix storage with SRDF results in high performance and continuity for your MOSS 2007 server farm. In addition, this unbeatable combination provides a complete solution as opposed to SQL replication and mirroring. This solution provides the following benefits: Fast Recovery from Server Failures Synchronization in disk arrays will be processed in the background and will not interrupt the Production site operations.when performing a failover/failback the remote or local site experiences minimal downtime with Boot from SAN. Simplified Restart from Server Failures Rather than completing the lengthy process of re-installing the operating system and backing up the data to DR site, the DR site servers are simply booted from the SAN. This allows immediate access to the data stored on the SAN, and returns your environment to Production with maximum efficiency. Consistent Failover EMC SRDF Consistency Groups (CGs) ensure write consistency of the data by providing remote mirroring in the event of a site disaster. All standard devices will be synchronized to the remote site, guaranteeing data integrity. Centralized Management The EMC Symmetrix Management Console provides a centralized management interface for performing the SRDF failover and failback from the Production and DR sites. EMC can help accelerate assessment, design, implementation, and management while lowering the implementation risks and cost of creating a MOSS 2007 server farm. To learn more about this and other solutions, contact an EMC representative or visit www.emc.com/solutions/microsoft. 12