Choosing Scalable Active Directory Account Creation Mode (Windows SharePoint Services 2.0)

In the situation described by this white paper, the team chose scalable hosting mode with Active Directory account creation configuration to meet the following requirements:

• SharePoint sites have a naming convention by which a host name is identified with a customer site, for example, https://customer.program.host_name.com.

• Each customer site should have a configurable disk space quota. Quotas in Windows SharePoint Services enforce this limit.

• Customers can invite their friends or colleagues to collaborate on their sites, but the number of accounts created by customers can be limited by using user-invitation quotas.

• Sites support e-mail for sending invitations and alert results.

• The hosting organization creates sites for customers. Members of the Administrator site group or service accounts that have necessary permissions on the server can create sites by using the Windows SharePoint Services object model, the Stsadm.exe command line tool, or the SharePoint Central Administration pages.

• English versions of Windows SharePoint Services are installed on each front-end Web server. Language packs and template packs for German and Japanese are also installed on the servers to enable creating sites in Japanese and German languages. (Other language packs, including those for Chinese – Simplified, Chinese – Traditional, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, and French will be available when the final version of Windows SharePoint Services is available.)

• Usage logging and processing is enabled so that customers can track traffic and see usage data from Site Administration.

In addition, the Internet Platform and Operations group had the following goals for the Windows SharePoint Services deployment:

• Validate the Windows SharePoint Services scalability design and implement a huge data store. Windows SharePoint Services supports scalability through multiple servers in server farms. To prove scalability and compatibility, the server farm was configured to contain at least two unique content databases on two clusters running Microsoft SQL Server™ and a storage area network (SAN) repository with more than 700 GB of raw data.

• Verify that upgrading and applying software patches to Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, and SQL Server work in a Windows SharePoint Services server farm environment. All of the Web front-end servers, Active Directory servers, and servers running SQL Server are routinely updated with service packs as they become available to ensure security and stability of the server farm.

• Provide high availability, reliability, and short response time. The server farm uses Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0, Windows Server 2003, Windows SharePoint Services, SQL Server clustering, and hardware load balancing to provide high availability for customer sites, excluding planned downtime for upgrades. Windows Cluster service, SQL Server clustering, load balancing across front-end Web servers, and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) technologies provide scalability and monitoring support, as well as availability.

• Design the backup and disaster recovery plans. Back up content and configuration information regularly and test the restoration during complete system failure situations.

• Support up to 15,000 customer sites at 30 MB for each site.

• Test wild-card Domain Name System (DNS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Implement wild-card DNS and SSL on the server farm and identify limitations of these solutions.

• Design security and Active Directory directory service implementation strategies that can meet ISP or domain controller needs. Review infrastructure and security design to help ensure that Windows SharePoint Services infrastructure architecture can support stringent security requirements for enterprise-level server farms.

• Fully or partially automate configuration and deployment efforts. Minimize the need for operations resources.

• Work with external customers, provide feedback, and identify Windows SharePoint Services (Beta) bugs to enhance service quality.

The remaining sections of this white paper describe how to deploy Windows SharePoint Services to satisfy all of these goals. The deployment descriptions include server types and configurations, the Active Directory configuration, the design of authentication and authorization design, additional installation and deployment steps, and the configuration of the second content database and Windows SharePoint Services utilities. Three additional white papers focus on the design of monitoring, network and load balancing, and data repository for this deployment.