André Krijnen

The first of all is, when you go to a customer for a simple upgrade to SharePoint 2010 isn’t going to be easy. Why, well Rick Taylor is one of the masters of upgrading to SharePoint 2010, and now I know why he is preaching about all the mess you going to have with upgrading to SharePoint 2010.

A simple thought about upgrading isn’t going to be, why? Every customer has custom solutions, changed css’s or anything of that stuff, but it’s going to be worse. When you have Site Definitions, what is not the best practice of course it is going to be alot worse. All kinds of developers are writing and developing nice Site Definitions but when you are at the stage you want to upgrade these developers kan start all over again. Yes, because they put everything in a solution. Every complete customized lists, document libraries and blogs.

Wow, well if you are an architect or a business manager and you hear about Site Definitions and you’re upgrading to SharePoint 2010. You can think twice, and even need to save some money to hire a developer that can write all the site definitions again which are not best practice off course. Yes, why I am writing this blog, because I just started to upgrade some solution that is written if all the above mess. Customized blog pages, document libraries, lists, etc. Yes we make features and we make site definitions and we put them all in one bucket called a WSP and hopefully it will work under SharePoint 2010, because you’ll never know.

The last couple of days I was working at a customer where Kerberos was needed for SharePoint 2010. Of course I started to set the different Service Principal Names for my App Pool accounts, farm accounts, machines, etc. Not to hard to do it, but I ran everytime in a 401 error: The requsted resources requires user authentication.
Strange I thought, but yet I sended the Domain Administrator more commando’s and it didn’t help. So I checked everything, checked for duplicates, etc. Still I ran into these errors.

After some search I found out that there are some problems with IIS 7.0 regarding Kerberos, and I needed to configure the applicationHost.config to solve these issues with Kerberos. enabled the kernel activation mode, etc. But, it didn’t make any difference, rebooted several times, removed the Kernel Activation Mode and removed again the changed on the applicationHost.config.

I knew that we’ve made C-Name records and it gave me a wonderfull idea to change the C-Name records to A records. These changes where applied, and wow, in less time as expected I opened IE and opened the different web apps. In less then a second the page was displayed from my web app. When you run in these problems, change your C-Name record to A-record and it will fix all your problems with SPN’s, Kerberos and IIS 7.0

When I started to work with SharePoint 2010 I’ve noticed that there are alot of issues regarding the User Profile Synchronization. Alot of people mentioned the following event viewer problems:

Microsoft.ResourceManagement.ServiceHealthSource
Event ID: 22
Level: Error

The Forefront Identity Manager Service cannot connect to the SQL Database Server.

The SQL Server could not be contacted. The connection failure may be due to a network failure, firewall configuration error, or other connection issue. Additionally, the SQL Server connection information could be configured incorrectly.

Verify that the SQL Server is reachable from the Forefront Identity Manager Service computer. Ensure that SQL Server is running, that the network connection is active, and that the firewall is configured properly. Last, verify the connection information has been configured properly. This configuration is stored in the Windows Registry.

ILM Web Service Configuration
Event ID: 234
Level: Warning

ILM Certificate could not be created: netsh http error:netsh http add urlacl url=http://+:5726/ user=MSSDEVIA\MSSFARM sddl=D:(A;;GA;;;S-1-5-21-3647457175-3930976156-3381717532-1106)

ForeFront Identity Manager
Event ID: 3
Level: Error

.Net SqlClient Data Provider: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Cannot open database “User Profile Service Application_SyncDB_1d4b979635654411b18ce834c5c0a76a” requested by the login. The login failed.
Login failed for user ‘MSSDEVIA\mssfarm’.
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Data.Exception.DataAccessExceptionManager.ThrowException(SqlException innerException)
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Data.DatabaseConnection.Open(SqlConnection connection)
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Data.DatabaseConnection.Open(DataStore store)
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Data.TransactionAndConnectionScope..ctor(Boolean createTransaction, IsolationLevel isolationLevel, DataStore dataStore)
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Data.TransactionAndConnectionScope..ctor(Boolean createTransaction)
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Data.DataAccess.RegisterService(String hostName)
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Workflow.Hosting.HostActivator.RegisterService(String hostName)
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Workflow.Hosting.HostActivator.Initialize()
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.WebServices.ResourceManagementServiceHostFactory.CreateServiceHost(String constructorString, Uri[] baseAddresses)
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.WindowsHostService.OnStart(String[] args)

ForeFront Identity Manager
Event ID: 3
Level: Error

.Net SqlClient Data Provider: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: HostId is not registered
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Data.Exception.DataAccessExceptionManager.ThrowException(SqlException innerException)
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Data.DataAccess.RetrieveWorkflowDataForHostActivator(Int16 hostId, Int16 pingIntervalSecs, Int32 activeHostedWorkflowDefinitionsSequenceNumber, Int16 workflowControlMessagesMaxPerMinute, Int16 requestRecoveryMaxPerMinute, Int16 requestCleanupMaxPerMinute, Boolean runRequestRecoveryScan, Boolean& doPolicyApplicationDispatch, ReadOnlyCollection`1& activeHostedWorkflowDefinitions, ReadOnlyCollection`1& workflowControlMessages, List`1& requestsToRedispatch)
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Workflow.Hosting.HostActivator.RetrieveWorkflowDataForHostActivator()
at Microsoft.ResourceManagement.Workflow.Hosting.HostActivator.ActivateHosts(Object source, ElapsedEventArgs e)

Of course I’ve watched the different blog posts from different MVP’s and others. But there still seems to be alot of different issues regarding the UPS of SharePoint 2010. Yet, I’ve found out that there are more issues as they speak of.
In my case the scenario was alot different then rights on the local machine or on the domain. The users had all the rights to perform Replicate Directory Changes on the domain, and yet I’ve had these errors.

I’d Visual Studio 2010 installed and it came up with the Jit-In-Time debugger with errors.

An unhandled exception (‘System.ServiceModel.ProtocolException’) occurred in OWSTIMER.exe [5630]

Application Error
Event ID: 1000
Level: Error

Faulting Application name: OWSTIMER.exe, version: 14.0.4762.1000, time stamp: 0x4bad920c
Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 04xa5bdfe0
Exception code: 0xe0434f4d
Fault offset: 0x000000000aa7d
Faulting Process id: 0xa58
Faulting application start time: 0x01cb2cacfed18e83
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\14\Bin\OWSTIMER.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\KERNELBASE.dll
Report id: f3b92d5f-98a3-11df-b4fd-000c29240fea

So, I’ve opened a new instance of Visual Studio 2010 Debugger, and it came up that the internal Proxy Server needed authentication. I did get a 407: Proxy Authentication Required.

If you think you’ve done everything to the different blog posts you’ve writtend, and you can’t find any issues, it can be that something else blocking your way to use the different SharePoint Application Services.

MS is not helping you with these kind of issues, but when you need some help, try to use Visual Studio on your application server, or server that is going to host the UPS service to identify which errors it comes up with.

If you can’t use Visual Studio because it’s a production environment, try to get a test environment in the same environment your production environment is in, and install there Visual Studio.

In the last couple of years I installed alot of different farms for SPS2003, MOSS 2007 and yet I started with the installation of MSS 2010.
Most organizations started using Virtualization software like VMWare ESX of other virtualization software. As far as I know I had to most problems with MOSS 2007 on virtual boxes. The most problems where database servers or badly configured boxes.

When you’re using SQL Server or other database server you’ll will see that when they are bad configured your farm is performing very very bad. Why?

One of the biggest reasons is that when you’re running a database direct on a Virtual Hard Drive it will not perform as well. Why? Mostly the vhd’s are using the same LUN on a SAN or physical disk. The best option here is to use pass-through disk to a LUN on a SAN.

Second when you’re running a DB server on a Virtual Box and you allocate shared memory and shared CPU’s it will also cost performance. This is also for MOSS or SP2010. You should use one-on-one CPU. So if you need 4 virtual CPU’s you’ll also need 4 cores and not sockets. For another example check your NUMA(Non Uniform Memory Access).

If you have a virtualbox with 8 cores and 32 GB of memory then your NUMA is 4 GB. So you can maximum allocate 4 GB of memory to a virtual server. If you allocate more memory it can cost your performance.

If your using VLAN’s and you have multiple Virtual Switches ensure that your MOSS or SP2010 environment is using the same Virtual Switch. If the latency is higher then 1ms your performance will drop. MOSS and SP2010 will only have a good performance with a very low latency.

Also if you’re running an AD server and this server is also running poorly your SharePoint environment will also perform poorly. SharePoint authenticates alot.

Most hardware performance issues are written above. Look at it when you’re making SharePoint environment virtualized. 80% of the problems are the DB server of the Indexing Server of your SharePoint environment.

Well I installed a complete new infrastructure to test the first beta of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. So configured a SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP with Windows Server 2008 R2 EE on Hyper-V.

Everything done. And let’s play with MSS 2010. Well I was happy to say that I had the option of installing a farm. Well when the installation was running I could say I was disappointed by the fact that SQL Server 2008 was installed on the APP server. So I concluded that the first installation I had no choice that SQL Server was running on the same machine.

The second conclusion is the unforsaken Ribbon of Office 2007. You have alot more options, but if you can say that everything will be worked out better? Well I can say that MOSS 2007 was allready full with bugs with the initial RTM release, and how many bugs can we have with MSS 2010? Well hopefully not that much like MOSS 2007 RTM, because we can wait again for along time to see the first SP. The naming of WSS to Foundation isn’t not too bad, but if you can say if it is a Foundation?

The next thing is the fact that not ASP.NET 4.0 Beta 2 is used by MSS 2010. So we’re going not upwards, but standing still with the same framework. Also noticed that you have to
use some regfixes to fix some bugs for MSS 2010. Too bad!

First conclusion:

MSS 2010 is alot faster.
MSS 2010 has .NET Framework 2.0/3.5 and not .NET 4.0
Beta and farm installation is too bad.
MSS 2010 has alot of new features and options (also Lotes Notes included).

And yet more to come.