MinRole
MinRole
Zero Downtime Patching (ZDP) in SharePoint Server 2016 has a marketing heavy silly name, but it's actually sweetness on a stick.
Whilst I hate the name, it is accurate in respect to the basics of the new patching process and the changes made in 2016 to support it. Now as to whether a customer would actually perform real world patching operations with such an expectation is another matter entirely. Here's a hint: they wouldn't. There's a lot more to patching an environment than updating the bits of the software. Or there should be, otherwise you shouldn't be running the environment....
In SharePoint 2013, the Distributed Cache size is set to half of ten percent of the total RAM on the server. This means that on a server with 8Gb RAM, the Cache Size (the allocation for data storage) is 410Mb. Another 410Mb is used for the overhead of running the Cache. This is a reasonable default as the system has no way of knowing which other services will be provisioned onto the server. And of course by default in SharePoint 2013 every machine in the farm will host Distributed Cache, unless you build your farm properly using the –SkipRegisterAsDistributedCacheHost...
Whilst I have some much more in depth coverage of SharePoint 2016 coming soon, this is the first in a mini series of “nuggets” – tidbits of information on the new release. Unlike with previous releases I decided against publishing a lot of material whilst the product was in public preview and to wait until the RTM. This decision was driven by a number of factors I won’t bore you with. Many will be of the opinion that not a great deal has changed in SharePoint 2016. That is somewhat true, especially in respect to visible end user...
A couple of weeks ago I posted about the Playbook Imperative and Changing the Distributed Cache Service Identity, which generated a lot of interest and feedback regarding the “tooling approach” presented. The original intention of the post was to articulate the importance of understanding the playbook when performing operational service management of SharePoint farms. I had never intended to show “how to do it” in terms of creating tooling in Windows PowerShell. The PowerShell examples were created purely to demonstrate the playbook and were deliberately done in a way that meant the focus was on the tasks being performed rather...
Introduction One of the most common challenges facing those operating production SharePoint environments is the “missing playbook”. Even for deployments where operational service management (OSM) skills are strong it is impossible to deliver quality operational service without the playbook. It’s generally pretty uncommon for practitioners to factor OSM considerations into the design, or at least to do it well. Indeed, in many cases it is also impossible to do so completely as so much about the environment will not be known or understood prior to broad platform adoption. Whilst the playbook is imperative for any system, there is...