[SPC09] SharePoint 2010 Administration Improvements

This afternoon, the sessions I attended were about SharePoint Administration improvements. The sessions (Part 1 and Part 2) were delivered by the comic duo made by Shane Young and Todd Klindt. They demonstrated the new shiny tools and features that will ease the life of a SharePoint Administrator.

New hierarchy containment objects:

• Services (in a way of a modularized SSP: metadata service, search, profiles…)
• Service applications
• Service application databases (a LOT of them will be created by default)
• Services can be linked to specific site collections ("multi-tenancy")

Requirements

• Windows Server 2008 SP2 or later or Windows Server 2008 R2
• SQL Server 2005 SP2 / SQL Server 2008 SP1 CU2 or later
• “Geneva” Framework
• Sync Framework
• There's a prerequisite installer that will install the missing pieces

Install Process

• Farm Passphrase, the master password to recreate the security key. It removes the dependency on the install account

• GPO policies can restrict where can SharePoint be installed

• Configuration Wizard (like SharePoint 2007 Setup has)

  • "14" hive instead of “12”

• Farm Configuration

  • New wizard In Central Administration
  • It performs the common Farm configuration
  • Pops up on first Central Administration run
  • Gotcha: the browser must have Central Administration set to trusted zone

• 4 GB limit in Basic Install (no more unlimited internal database :-( )

Managed Accounts

• Manage password changes according to your AD policies
• Automatic password changes performed by SharePoint

Other stuff

• SharePoint 2010 is mirror-aware and failover-aware, you have to specify the failover SQL server
• Claims Providers (Geneva Framework) now allow more than one authentication provider per web application

PowerShell

• Default tool for administration
• SharePoint Management Shell link or SharePoint Snap-in
• Faster than STSADM (it doesn't unload from memory)

Backup and Restore

• Farm backups are the same format as before, but they can make configuration-only backup and use multiple threads
• Granular Backup is now supported for Site collections, webs and lists
• Recover data from and unattached content database (the URL dropdown is broken but works)

Throttling

• The performance is monitored and the users are kept from "shooting themselves in the foot"

  • No more 2000 items limit, now it’s 50 million items
  • The output is throttled in order not to overload the server
  • Can be overriden by Object Model, but the Admins can disable the override
  • “Happy Hour” Settings (Daily Time Windows for Large Queries): you can program when the result limit trimming is disabled
  • Admins and Users have different settings for throttling
  • HTTP Requests are monitored and 503 errors (Server busy) are launched for GET requests and timer jobs (PUT requests are still allowed)
    • Launched by 3 indicator peaks over limit

• Developer Dashboard

  • It can be used to monitor page load and performance
  • It can be activated on demand

Logging

• ULS logs now accept correlation ID for a specific request (shown at Developer Dashboard) and can trace a whole request from the beginning to the end
• Event Log flood protection: it removes the duplicated error messages in Event Log (triggered by default when it’s repeated  times in a row)
• “Set to default” option for ULS logging settings. The new UI shows the non-default settings in bold.
• Logging can be exported to SQL Logging database (the schema will publicly be announced by MS)
• Log Space can be restricted so not to overrun the disk space

Best Practices Analyzer

• Health Rules that run periodically, integrated into SharePoint Central Administration
• These rules are extensible
• These rules can automatically repair some rule violations

Timer Jobs

• Server Affinity: you can specify which server will run which timer job
• “Run on demand” command
• Progress bar for timer jobs
• Report for the jobs that executed (with error messages and run details)

Patching and Upgrade

• You can now have servers and database at different patch level
• Database can be at lower version than the binaries that you have installed
• Lowers the downtime of the farm