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Monday, July 6, 2009

Application Configuration Guidance (Part II) [MOSS 2007]

As SharePoint Architect, often I have to deal with various MOSS 2007 installation and configuration scenarios for each of the clients I have consulted. Eventually I ended up with my quick cheat sheet. Eventually they resulted with two sets of information, one is more focused on Architecture Definition (Part I) and then one that is focused on Application Configuration focused.

Most of the information I have collected and put together are from various Microsoft produced content. It was just easier for me to quickly look it up and have a very high level idea of the focused area.

1. Prior to install
  • This section assumes you have performed the capacity planning for the MOSS Farm and have selected appropriate MOSS server(s) and configurations.
  • Consider following prior to installation:
  • There is no direct upgrade from a stand-alone installation to a farm installation.
  • Installing Office SharePoint Server 2007 on a domain controller requires additional configuration steps.
  • The Run WWW in IIS 5.0 isolation mode check box is only selected if you have upgraded to IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 from IIS 5.0 on Microsoft Windows 2000. New installations of IIS 6.0 use IIS 6.0 worker process isolation mode by default.
  • You must enable ASP.NET 2.0 on all Office SharePoint Server 2007 servers.
  • Server Farm or Database access account
  • The server farm account is used to access your configuration database.
  • It also acts as the application pool identity for the SharePoint Central Administration application pool.
  • It is the account under which the Windows SharePoint Services Timer service runs.
  • The SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard adds this account to the SQL Server Logins, the SQL Server Database Creator server role, and the SQL Server Security Administrators server role.
  • The user account that you specify as the service account must be a domain user account, but it does not need to be a member of any specific security group on your Web servers or your back-end database servers.
  • Specify a user account that is not a member of the Administrators group on your Web servers or your back-end servers.
  • SQL Server service account
  • This account is used as the service account for MSSQLSERVER and SQLSERVERAGENT

  • Installation Account
  • This account needs to be a member of the Administrators group on every server on which you install Office SharePoint Server 2007.
  • You can, however, remove this account from the Administrators group on the servers after installation.
2. Installation Guidelines

Recommended Order of installation

1. Central Administration Site

  • The Central Administration site be installed on an application server.
  • In a server farm that includes more than one application server, install the Central Administration site on the application server with the least overall performance load.
  • If your farm will have an application server, install Office SharePoint Server 2007 on that server first. This also installs the Central Administration site.
  • All your front-end Web servers.

2. The index server (if using a separate server for search queries and indexing).

  • It is not recommended that you install Office SharePoint Server 2007 on an index server first.
  • In farms with more than one index server, you should stop the Central Administration service on all index servers.
  • This service is used for the Central Administration site and is not required on index servers.
  • Stopping this service on index servers can help avoid URL resolution problems with indexing.
  • In the other hand, you must be sure that this service is started on the server that hosts the Central Administration Web site, even if that server is also an index server. You do not need to stop this service for installations where the farm has only one index server.

3. The query servers, if separate from the index server.

  • To configure more than one query server in your farm, you cannot configure your index server as a query server.

4. Other application servers (optional).

3. Other installation and configuration guidelines
  • You should disable the Windows SharePoint Service Web Application service on all servers that are not serving content, especially index servers. On the other hand, you must be sure that this service is enabled on the servers that are serving content.
  • All of the Web servers in your server farm must have the same SharePoint Products and Technologies installed. For example, if all of the servers in your server farm are running Office SharePoint Server 2007, you cannot add to your farm a server that is running only Microsoft Office Project Server 2007. To run Office Project Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 on your server farm, you must install Office Project Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 on each of your Web servers. To enhance the security of your farm and reduce the surface area that is exposed to a potential attack, you can turn off services on particular servers after you install SharePoint Products and Technologies.
  • You must use the Complete installation option on all computers you want to be index servers, query servers, or servers that run Excel Calculation Services
  • If you place a query server beyond a firewall from its index server, you must open the NetBIOS ports (TCP/User Datagram Protocol (UDP) ports 137, 138, and 139) on all firewalls that separate these servers. If your environment does not use NetBIOS, you must use direct-hosted server message block (SMB). This requires that you open the TCP/UDP 445 port.
  • If you want to have more than one index server in a farm, you must use a different Shared Services Provider (SSP) for each index server.
  • Run Setup and then the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard on all your farm servers. Do this on all farm servers before going on to create a Shared Services Provider (SSP).
  • We recommend that you run Setup on all the servers that will be in the farm before configuring the farm.
  • You can add servers to the farm at this point, or after you have created and configured an SSP. You can add servers after you have created and configured an SSP to add redundancy, such as additional load-balanced Web servers or additional query servers. It is recommended that you run Setup and the configuration wizard on all your application servers before you create and configure the SSP.
  • Because the SSP configuration requires an index server, you must start the Office SharePoint Server Search service on the computer that you want to be the index server, and configure it as an index server before you can create an SSP. Because of this, you must deploy and configure an index server before other servers. You can choose any server to be the first server on which you install Office SharePoint Server 2007. However, the Central Administration Web site is automatically installed on the first server on which you install Office SharePoint Server 2007.
  • You can configure different features on different servers. The following table shows which installation type you should use for each feature set.

Server type

Installation type

Central Administration Web application

Complete or Web Front End

Application server (such as Excel Calculation Services)

Complete

Search index server

Complete

Search query server

Complete

Web server

Web Front End (subsequent servers must join an existing farm) or Complete

If you choose the Web Front End installation option you will not be able to run additional services, such as search, on the server.

  • When you install Office SharePoint Server 2007 on the first server, you establish the farm. Any servers that you add you will join to this farm.
  • Setting up the first server involves two steps: installing the Office SharePoint Server 2007 components on the server, and configuring the farm. After Setup finishes, you can use the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard to configure Office SharePoint Server 2007. The SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard automates several configuration tasks, including: installing and configuring the configuration database, installing Office SharePoint Server 2007 services, and creating the Central Administration Web site.
  • In farms with more than one index server, you should stop the Central Administration service on all index servers. This service is used for the Central Administration site and is not required on index servers. Stopping this service on index servers can help avoid URL resolution problems with indexing. On the other hand, you must be sure that this service is started on the server that hosts the Central Administration Web site, even if that server is also an index server. You do not need to stop this service for installations where the farm has only one index server.
  • Before stopping the service on the index server, make sure that the service is running another server.

UPDATED

Hardware Related

(I will keep this updated as I find more relevant information….)

1 comment:

SandipK said...

Its Brilliant Short Note !