Silicon Anniversary

It's January - Bob and I will celebrate our fifteenth wedding anniversary this year!

The Iron Anniversary in 2010 brought us the HyperV host that runs SharePoint 2010 (plus other VMs, including a MineCraft VM server that our sons enjoy).  Looks like this year is the Silicon Anniversary - time for more memory so that we can fire up additional VMs.  I'm installing the Systems Center 2012 suite to kick the tires before it is released in April, and have started with Systems Center Service Manager.

What's that got to do with SharePoint?  In the past few years all the Microsoft server products have been converging on the use of the SQL database engine, SQL Reporting and Analysis Services, Web Services, and SharePoint.  If you are used to being 'just the SharePoint Administrator' get ready for a wild ride because all the Microsoft products will have pieces that need to be installed in your SharePoint farm.  You're now not just the 'enterprise collaboration' guy, you are also the ERP portal guy, and the Infrastructure Operations portal guy.

All this convergence makes a huge amount of sense.  Deploying every Microsoft product in its own silo with databases and web portals deployed on application servers is a waste of licensing and limits your ability to scale out the system.  In my HyperV world (at this time) I only have 4 CPUs per VM, so I always make sure I'm deploying products in a scale out configuration, even if it means just starting with two load balanced application servers or a two node SQL cluster.  That way I can always add capacity later without completely reconfiguring the system.

In reality, even if this is where Microsoft is heading and it all makes sense, it's painful getting there.  Take a product like AX 2012 for instance, which includes the following components:
- Application Server (AOS)
- Transactional Database and Analytics (SQL Database Engine and Analysis Services)
- Reporting (SQL Reporting Services)
- Web Services for data access and systems integration
- Enterprise Portal (SharePoint)

Say we've seen the future and have drunk the scale-out kool-aid, and want to deploy AX in a fully scaled out configuration.  It's pretty straightforward to deploy the AOS cluster, but the explanation of the actual clustering technology and techniques is confusing since there is AX specific load balancing, as well as ways you can use Microsoft NLB in addition to the AX specific clustering.  The documentation on why you might want to do this, or not, is not clear.

You would also want to deploy the AX reports in a separate, scaled out, SSRS environment - this is also painful.  We have a separate two node NLB cluster for Web Services, so this was relatively easy.  The AX Help Server is just a standard web application (but why not use our existing SharePoint farm for this?).   Saving the best for last, we have the AX Enterprise Portal.  The deployment of the AX Enterprise Portal on our scaled out SharePoint farm was a huge pain due to the lack of information that a SharePoint administrator needs.  We had to open a Premier incident and get previously un-published documentation. 

If Microsoft really wants us to buy the Hyper-V scale out deployment model, the ideal set of information on every product would include the full scale out topology option and documentation of how and when to use Microsoft NLB (or other load balancers like F5) as needed to configure the scale out scenario.  It would take into consideration the integration with existing scaled out deployments of SQL and SharePoint.  Most installation documentation I see assumes you are starting with a brand new environment, not existing SharePoint farms or SQL clusters.  Heck, I can get any product installation to work when I install everything on one VM in an isolated environment, but that does me no good in the real world.

So, I'm curious to see how the Systems Center products play in the real world...  I'm not planning to install a completely separate SharePoint farm, SQL cluster or SSRS environment just for Systems Center when I can continue to scale out the environment I've got...  I think this is where Microsoft wants it all to go, but based on my experience with AX 2012 they are not making it easy.

If Microsoft is converging on SQL and SharePoint for applications like AX and Systems Center, I'd like to see more load balancing information and deployment documentation written for the SQL and SharePoint administrators who live in the real, scaled out, world.  Maybe for my next anniversary (the Cloud Anniversary?)...