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Tech-Ed Diary – Day 2

Many interesting sessions today, these are just the more important points:

System Center family applications (System Center and the Datacenter session):

  • Very powerful UI to manage, monitoring and simulate our application infrastructures.

  • Deployments more easy for OSs and applications. You have a boot image and you can add to it as components and configurations as you need. For example, you can add a network configuration, graphical drivers, last hotfixes, or you can configure it as a DNS or DHCP or any other role that you can assign to them. These functionalities are available to deploy both servers and client computers.

  • Powerful reporting tool to apply to the monitoring results.

Protecting SharePoint Server with System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 session

Data Protection Manager (DPM) is a tool used to make backups and recover data for several applications like SharePoint or Exchange. It search for memory blocks that have been changed and make a copy of them, the old blocks have been stored as Recovery points. You can recovery the data from any of the Recovery points that DPM has stored (it runs like a “versioning” system).

In SharePoint the DPM agent have to be installed on all data servers, index and query servers and on the web server where the VSS Writer component is running. You can recover any SharePoint database (as Content, Config or Index ones), but the more important thing is that you can recover an item or a document. To do it you need a Recovery server in the middle where the Content database will be restored and then DPM copy the item or document to recover to the production SharePoint farm.

Windows 2008 Failure Clustering Troubleshooting Tips and Best Practices session

Validation tool is the new one to check the hardware and component compatibility with Windows 2008 Cluster. This tool substitute the HCL (Hardware Compatibility List) tool used until now by manufacturers to certificate their products to run with MS Cluster. Now both manufacturers and customers could run the Validation tool, and customers could ensure that their environment is configured correctly. The tip is to run Validation tool each time that you have change something on your environment. Validation tool generate a visual report where you can see what components are failing to the check executed by the tool and get a detailed explanation about the issue.

Also we can use the Event Viewer tool in Windows 2008 platform to find the errors, warning or message generated by our Cluster. On Windows 2008 the Event Viewer includes a section on the Application one dedicated to Clustering including many information related to the events generated by our Cluster environment.

In the other hand, cluster.log file is replaced by a new log file more graphical and complete that you can navigate in a more easy way and it can be exported to several formats.

Regarding to SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) we have attending to interesting sessions named “SharePoint Ports, Protocols and Proxies: an end-to-end on SharePoint inter-server communication” and “Notes from the Field: Designing & Deploying Scalable Extranet Environments with SharePoint”.

The first one was focused to list the ports needed in the different MOSS topologies, a good reminder about how the different MOSS components talk among them:

  • 80 or 443 from users to Web Front Ends

  • 80 and 443 from Index to WFEs

  • 445 from Index to WFEs

  • 137 and 138 UDP from WFEs to Query

  • 56737 and 56738 (SSL) from WFEs to MOSS Web Services (Index, Query and Excel Calculation)

  • 56737 and 56738 (SSL) in bidirectional mode between Index and Query

  • 1433 (or custom) from WFEs, Index, Query and Excel to SQL

  • 135 (RPC endpoint mapper) from WFEs to Index and Excel

The second one was focused on how to build extranet environments using MOSS 2007 using from a configuration point of view the Zones and the Alternate Access Mappings functionalities, and from an infrastructure point of view ISA Server (Internet Security & Acceleration) and IGA Server (Intelligent Application Gateway) .

IGA has similar characteristics that ISA but includes more features like to work with Federation services (ADFS), an Endpoint health detection or a granular access policy. All of these features enabled you, besides to validate the user on your enterprise Federation AD, to ensure that, for example, the client machine has installed, updated and running the last version of Symantec antivirus or if his IE has installed the last service pack and hotfixes. In other case, the user receive an error message describing why his connection can’t be accepted.

Very interested and completed day, see you tomorrow.

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