Deploying Microsoft SharePoint Services with Stingray Traffic Manager DEPLOYMENT GUIDE

Deploying Microsoft SharePoint Services with Stingray Traffic Manager DEPLOYMENT GUIDE

Table of Contents Overview... 2 Installation and Initial Configuration of SharePoint services... 3 System Requirements... 3 Software requirements for SharePoint... 3 Installing SharePoint... 3 Topology... 3 Configuring SharePoint services... 3 Create a Web Application... 3 User Permissions... 3 Configuring Stingray Traffic Manager... 7 Connecting to the SharePoint web site through Stingray Traffic Manager... 9 Uploading Documents to SharePoint... 10 Testing fault tolerance... 14 Conclusion... 15 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 1

Overview Microsoft SharePoint services provide an integrated suite of server capabilities for central storage and collaboration, space for documents, information and ideas. Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager is a powerful Layer 7 Traffic Manager (available as software, hardware appliance or Virtual Appliance) which manages your application traffic, inspecting, transforming and routing requests as it load-balances them across the application infrastructure. By using Stingray Traffic Manager to load-balance and manage traffic across two or more clustered SharePoint servers, you can achieve dramatic improvements in capacity and reliability. Adding more SharePoint servers to your cluster will scale capacity linearly, and Stingray Traffic Manager s application acceleration technology offloading, caching, HTTP optimization increases the capacity improvements further. When you load-balance traffic across two or more SharePoint servers, you make the entire service resilient to routine downtime (upgrades and reboots) and unexpected errors (such as hardware failures). 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 2

Installation and Initial Configuration of SharePoint services System Requirements Software requirements for SharePoint IIS 6.0..NET 2.0 Framework SharePoint Microsoft SQL Server (optional) Installing SharePoint See the following urls for information on how to install SharePoint http://www.datasprings.com/resources/articlesinformation/overviewoninstallingsharepoint2007/tabid/774/default.aspx http://mindsharpblogs.com/bill/archive/2006/06/27/1153.aspx Topology For the purposes of this document, we used the following setup in our example: A Windows Server 2003 system running Microsoft SQL Express Edition 2005 (to store the SharePoint databases). The IP address of this server was 10.100.70.73. A Windows Server 2003 system running IIS 6.0,.NET and SharePoint. The IP address of this server was 10.100.70.72. A second Windows Server 2003 running IIS 6.0,.NET and SharePoint. This server was also the domain controller for the domain SHAREPOINT. The IP address of this server was 10.100.70.74. A Stingray Traffic Manager 7400 system to provide traffic management. Stingray Traffic Manager software or virtual appliances could also have been used. IIS servers Figure 2.1 Typical example of a Stingray Traffic Manager setup 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 3

Configuring SharePoint services Create a Web Application Connect to the SharePoint administration website using a browser (default port is 14921). Use the administration website to create a new web application (Figure 2.2), listening on port 80, choose a load balanced URL and set an authentication method. Figure 2.2 In our example, we created our web application on port 80 and assigned a load balanced URL of http://sharepoint.techserv.cam.riverbed.com/ so that we could access both SharePoint servers through this URL (Figure 2.3). We used NTLM (windows based) authentication to our SharePoint web site. The DNS name in the load-balanced URL (e.g. sharepoint.techservices.cam.zeus.com ) must resolve to an IP address that is present on the Stingray Traffic Manager traffic managers, not to any of the IP addresses of the SharePoint servers. You can achieve this using DNS, or simply by modifying the hosts files in your test servers and client. If there is not an appropriate DNS name to use, you may also use the IP address directly in the load-balanced URL, for example, http://10.100.9.32/. Figure 2.3 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 4

We then created a web application by clicking on Create a Site Collection. This creates the SharePoint web site content so that users can upload, share and modify documents. In our example, we chose Team Site so that users could access and modify files: Figure 2.4 For our testing purposes, we created the following test users in Active Directory: SHAREPOINT\johnsmith ; SHAREPOINT\johndoe ; SHAREPOINT\janedoe User Permissions It is necessary to assign permissions to users so that they can access, modify, read, upload files, etc. Users can be assigned to predefined groups, and the administrator can also create new groups with custom permissions. This can be done on an individual basis, but using groups makes user access management easier. Once we had created our test users, we logged back into the SharePoint administration website and went to the section People and Groups. We assigned our test users permission to access the SharePoint website. Two of our test users ( johndoe and janedoe ) were given full access, and one user ( johnsmith ) was given read only access (Figures 2.5 and 2.6): 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 5

Figure 2.5 Figure 2.6 Once the basic SharePoint web application, web site and users are configured, Stingray Traffic Manager can be configured to manage the traffic to the SharePoint server farm. 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 6

Configuring Stingray Traffic Manager Stingray Traffic Manager should be configured to listen for traffic on behalf of the two SharePoint servers and then load-balance the requests across the two. To do this, log in to the Stingray Traffic Manager UI, click on the Wizards and choose Manage a new service (Figure 3.1). Figure 3.1 Create a virtual server (Figure 3.2) to represent this load balanced service, giving it a name, selecting the protocol (HTTP) and the port that the protocol uses. Port 80 is the standard port that Web Browsers use to access a web site when using HTTP: Figure 3.2 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 7

You must then configure the pool of servers that Stingray Traffic Manager load-balances requests across (Figure 3.3). In our example, we used IP addresses but you could use hostnames (as long as they are resolvable). Figure 3.3 Confirm the selections to create the Virtual Server, ready to receive connections: Figure 3.4 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 8

Connecting to the SharePoint web site through Stingray Traffic Manager Once the Stingray Traffic Manager configuration is complete, you should test it to make sure you can access your SharePoint pool of servers through Stingray Traffic Manager. In our example, we had ensured that our client resolved our load balanced URL http://sharepoint.techserv.cam.riverbed.com to the IP address of Stingray Traffic Manager (in this case 10.100.9.32) by editing the hosts file on the client. This is appropriate for a simple test scenario but in a real deployment, one would use DNS to ensure that the domain name in a URL resolved to the correct IP address. Our test client was then ready to test SharePoint services through Stingray Traffic Manager. An initial connectivity test came first: Figure 4.1 Then we connected to our SharePoint website using a browser to test that Stingray Traffic Manager is managing the traffic to the SharePoint pool correctly. Log in as a permissioned user, including the Windows Domain component domain\user in the username: Figure 4.2 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 9

Uploading Documents to SharePoint Logged in users access the Shared Documents part of the SharePoint website to upload a document from their local machine to the SharePoint service: Figure 4.3 SharePoint displays a list of the documents with the username of the user who last modified them: Figure 4.4 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 10

If you have a look at the Stingray Traffic Manager UI, you should see traffic going through to the back end nodes. You can use the Activity monitor and Connections report to observe recent traffic. You can also use a TrafficScript response rule to print out diagnostic information to the event log. For example, the following TrafficScript response rule prints out the IP address of the back end node to record which node serviced each request: TrafficScript Response Rule: $node = connection.getnode(); log.info("backend node used was ".$node); Figure 4.5 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 11

We tested the correct operation of the SharePoint service by logging in to the SharePoint website as a different user (in this case SHAREPOINT\janedoe) and opening the file Sharepoint_doc1 within Microsoft Word (Figure 4.6). As user janedoe has full permissions in SharePoint, this file was editable. We modified the file and saved it back to SharePoint. Figure 4.6 SharePoint indicates that the file was last modified by Jane Doe, and the timestamp was updated: Figure 4.7 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 12

We could see that the traffic to the SharePoint pool was being managed by Stingray Traffic Manager: Figure 4.8 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 13

Testing fault tolerance One of the advantages of using Stingray Traffic Manager to manage traffic to your websites is that it monitors the health of the nodes in your pool. If it detects a problem with one of your nodes, it will mark it as unavailable and not direct any traffic to it. In this example, we configured a Full HTTP health monitor to check the health of the back-end SharePoint nodes. We stopped one of the two SharePoint servers (in this case 10.100.70.72, as we had not configured redundant domain controllers for this exercise). The Stingray Traffic Manager UI reported that a node (10.100.70.72) in the Sharepoint pool was down. Figure 5.1 We ran tests to make sure we could still connect to the SharePoint website. Login was successful, and all the traffic was sent to the only functional server, 10.100.70.74: Figure 5.2 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 14

Conclusion This document shows you how to configure a fault tolerant SharePoint web site by managing traffic to this site using Stingray Traffic Manager. The loss of a SharePoint server will not result in a loss of SharePoint service thanks to Stingray Traffic Manager. With the Stingray Traffic Manager, we can also use TrafficScript to make our traffic management more intelligent. For example, we could create 2 pools of servers e.g. High Priority and Low Priority and then, on the basis of the username, direct the user to one pool or the other. With Stingray Traffic Manager, you have endless abilities to manage your traffic in different ways. About Riverbed Riverbed delivers performance for the globally connected enterprise. With Riverbed, enterprises can successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without fear of compromising performance. By giving enterprises the platform they need to understand, optimize, and consolidate their IT, Riverbed helps enterprises to build a fast, fluid and dynamic IT architecture that aligns with the business needs of the organization. Additional information about Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD) is available at www.riverbed.com. Riverbed Technology, Inc. 199 Fremont Street San Francisco, CA 94105 Tel: (415) 247-8800 www.riverbed.com Riverbed Technology Ltd. The Jeffreys Building Cowley Road Cambridge CB4 0WS United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 1223 568555 Riverbed Technology Pte. Ltd. 391A Orchard Road #22-06/10 Ngee Ann City Tower A Singapore 238873 Tel: +65 6508-7400 Riverbed Technology K.K. Shiba-Koen Plaza Building 9F 3-6-9, Shiba, Minato-ku Tokyo, Japan 105-0014 Tel: +81 3 5419 1990 2011 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 15