ok maybe not gold but the 10,000 RPM drives are definitely worth the extra money.
As part of SharePoint 2010 testing, migration and upgrading of must be done. This process can take a lot of time. Unless you have high performance SCSI based servers just lying around, you are probably using older hardware (probably desktops etc). Upgrading the dbs or restoring dbs is very read/write intensive (read time-consuming).
Spend the few extra dollars, and use the faster drive as your system (C) drive. A SATA 300GB 10k (ex. WD raptor drive) should QUICKLY restore and upgrade dbs. Further, it does not require expensive SCSI controllers- just plain old SATA connectors.
Remember – you only want to use the faster drive for the restore or upgrade of the db (it should save you gobs of time). Move the data files to a slower drive. There is little perceivable performance gain from running dev/test dbs on a high performance drive when not putting any load on it.
One exception might be the indexer box where you could permanently use a faster drive so the indexing turn around time is short.
Getting the PDF files indexed is generally not worth a blog post. Plenty has been written about PDFs and indexing on SharePoint. Different ifilters will give you different performance but what do you when a seemingly normal PDF just will NOT work show up?
Basics:
- Check your logs to make sure the search service is running
- Check the crawl log to see if any information is being provided
- Crawls are running as scheduled (I’ve had situations where the top 7 content sources will run on schedule but the 2 content sources below it will never start despite having a regular schedule.
- Reboot the servers (it can’t hurt!)
Troubleshooting the PDF file itself
- You index thousands of new PDFs everyday but a few just will not allow themselves.
- Try and delete and PDF, run a couple of crawls over it and then re-upload the PDF.
If the PDF is still not showing up in the index, try the following (by the way, this process can be applied to other formats too):
- Break the file down into 1-page files. So if the problematic file was 10 pages, you would end up with 10 1-page files.
- Upload these files and index them all
- Look in the crawl log to see which ones were indexed fine and which ones gave the following error: The filtering process has been terminated.
- You have just narrowed down to the page which is giving you the error.
Good luck
Find Service Pack Level or Build of your SharePoint Farm
If you go to Site Actions –> Site Settings from any site on the server, you will see the version number in the Site Information section. See image below.
MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 post-SP1 hotfix 12.0.0.6300
MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 SP1 12.0.0.6219
MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 October public update 12.0.0.6039
MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 August 24, 2007 hotfix package 12.0.0.6036
MOSS 2007 or WSS 3.0 RTM 12.0.0.4518
Virtual and Physical SharePoint Servers
An attempt to scale out the SharePoint farm by adding a virtual WFE into the NLB led to the farm becoming inaccessible. After a while, we narrowed the problem down to the mix of VMs and Physical servers. Removed the VM and things started working normally.
VMs are still ok to use in other roles such as indexing and even as WFEs – just don’t mix. Ofcourse this problem may no longer be valid with the newer hardware, HyperV etc. The basic windows based NLB is not very intelligent. Consider a hardware load balancing device as an alternative.
AD or SharePoint Groups
Using SharePoint security groups can cause unnecessary crawls on the SharePoint farm. Essentially, when a user is removed from a SharePoint group, the servers will perform what is known as a “security only” crawl. The purpose of this crawl is to go through and remove the users from other places such as subsites. SharePoint will mark all kinds of content as “dirty” so they can to be recrawled.
Therefore, it is recommended that sites with high user turnover use AD accounts (domains\username) as much as possible.
Seasoned SharePoint Admin may already know this.
SharePoint 2010 launch date announced
According to Microsoft, the launch date for SharePoint and Office 2010 is May 12. They also claim to RTM mid April.
The release of dates is important as many software companies out there are reluctant to release the SP2010 version of their add-ons until they have a firm idea on the final release dates. Some have claimed that they will not begin testing against SP2010 until the RTM version is released.
More info from MS: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx
Simple Pleasures with SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 offers an upgrade status when attaching dbs. In the form of a percent complete, the black window sits idle no longer while you sit in suspense wondering if the system is frozen or just taking a long time.
The actual upgrade process after executing the stsadm -o addcontentdb can be long and nerve-wracking. Is the upgrade still churning?
If you are someone who stares at the hard drive light to see if your computer is just running slow or if it is done and needs a reboot- you know what I mean.
