How to generate HP Insight Dynamics
infrastructure orchestration templates with
the HP Sizer for Microsoft SharePoint
Server 2007
Technical white paper
Table of contents
Executive summary............................................................................................................................... 2
Downloading and installing the HP Sizer for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 .......................................... 3
Enabling the IO XML generator functionality ........................................................................................... 3
Generating an IO XML template file ....................................................................................................... 4
“Build a solution” sizer tutorial ........................................................................................................... 5
Notes and limitations ........................................................................................................................... 9
Importing the XML template ................................................................................................................. 10
Modifying the OS deployment job ................................................................................................... 11
Adding network resources ............................................................................................................... 12
Summary .......................................................................................................................................... 13
For more information .......................................................................................................................... 14
Executive summary
HP Insight Dynamics is advanced infrastructure lifecycle management software which allows you to
instantly adjust to dynamic business demands and provision a complex infrastructure in minutes.
HP Insight Dynamics includes:
 Integrated infrastructure design with automated activation of servers, storage and networking
 Built-in capacity planning and rebalancing tools
 Automated disaster recovery and failover capabilities.
With HP Insight Dynamics, infrastructure orchestration (IO) templates can be designed and published
to enable consistent application service provisioning from pools of shared resources via a self-service
portal. These templates are designed based on specific application service requirements and best
practices. To facilitate the process of designing and creating these templates, the HP Sizer for
Microsoft® SharePoint 2007 (V2.7 and later) includes the capability to automatically generate IO
templates based on the SharePoint solution requirements specified during the sizing process. This IO
template can then be imported directly into the HP IO Designer tool, saving administrators significant
time in the template planning and design process.
This document describes how to use the HP Sizer for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 sizing tool to
generate HP Insight Dynamics IO templates. The document also provides an overview of how to save
and import the resulting IO template, and describes the further modifications that are required before
the template can be saved and published for provisioning.
Target audience: This “How-to” guide is intended for HP Insight Dynamics or SharePoint architects
responsible for designing HP Insight Dynamics infrastructure orchestration service templates for
SharePoint 2007. This document assumes that you are familiar with HP Insight Dynamics and with
using the HP Sizer for SharePoint.
For more information on HP Insight Dynamics please visit www.hp.com/go/insightdynamics.
For more information on HP BladeSystem Matrix which utilizes HP Insight Dynamics as the
infrastructure orchestration software, please visit www.hp.com/go/matrix.
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Downloading and installing the HP Sizer for Microsoft
SharePoint Server 2007
The HP Sizer for SharePoint 2007 can be downloaded by clicking on the appropriate link from the
SharePoint solution page, www.hp.com/solutions/SharePoint. The download is a zip file that
contains the SharePoint sizer setup.exe file. To install the SharePoint sizer, launch the setup.exe and
follow the installation wizard.
Enabling the IO XML generator functionality
By default, the option to generate an IO XML template file is disabled. To enable this functionality you
need to first launch the SharePoint sizer. Once the SharePoint sizer has been started, select Show
‘Generate IO Template File’ Button from the Options drop-down menu in the top left of the sizer UI as
shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 – Enabling the IO XML file template generation
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Once this option has been enabled, a button will be displayed at the completion of each sizing
exercise. However, as shown in Figure 2, this button will not be enabled (it will be grayed-out) if a
solution is generated that does not meet specific criteria. This is discussed in greater detail in the
following section.
Figure 2 – Displaying the “Generate IO Template File” button
Generating an IO XML template file
While the option to display the “Generate IO Template File” button has now been enabled, this does
not mean that the button itself will always be enabled. This was depicted in the previous figure above
(Figure 2). This button will only be enabled for SharePoint solutions that meet all of the following
conditions:
 Server platform type is “Blade” for all SharePoint server roles
 Storage architecture is “SAN (Fibre Channel)” for SharePoint roles with external storage
requirements – example: SQL Server, Index Search and Query Search roles
 A physical, rather than virtualized solution is being created
The reason these restrictions exist is that there are certain infrastructure requirements to utilize HP
Insight Dynamics infrastructure orchestration. For physical server provisioning, HP Insight Dynamics
requires HP server blades connected to an external FC storage array (HP BladeSystem Matrix1 for
example). Thus, the SharePoint sizer prevents you from creating an IO template that is based on a
design for different server or storage architectures.
1
4
For more information on the HP BladeSystem Matrix please visit www.hp.com/go/matrix.
The following tutorial will walk through how you can use the SharePoint sizer to generate an IO
template.
Note:
The following examples are focused on solutions that generate an IO XML
template file and are not meant to be a comprehensive description of how
to use the SharePoint sizer. For more general help on using the SharePoint
2007 sizer, please select the “Sizer help…” option from the “Help” pulldown menu.
“Build a solution” sizer tutorial
When running the HP sizer for SharePoint there are a number of input options and UI screens used to
solicit information about the solution needs and deployment options to meet the business needs. This
section will briefly illustrate these, and will highlight the UI input options and screens that are relevant
for generating the IO XML template file.
To launch a sizing session, press the Build a Solution button from the main screen. You will then
navigate through the solution requirements input screens, as shown in the following examples.
On the Usage Data screen, shown in Figure 3, enter the general characteristics of the expected user
population, and the peak workload throughput a typical user will generate during their busiest hour.
There are no impacts on generating the IO XML template file.
Figure 3 – Usage Data screen
5
Next (Figure 4), specify the workload percentage breakdown across a range of possible areas, and
the expected degree of content modification. Again, no impacts on template generation.
Figure 4 – Solution Component screen
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On the Usage Characteristics screen (Figure 5), enter further information about solution requirements.
Of note is the entry “Is a high availability solution required?” If true (as would be expected in an
Enterprise solution) then the sizer will automatically mandate SAN storage technology – this being
required to support the failover cluster technology that will be employed to ensure high availability
(HA). Template generation requires a SAN FC StorageWorks technology to be used.
Note that in the case of not requiring HA, you can still specify that SAN FC storage be used, as is
shown later in Figure 7.
Figure 5 – Usage Characteristics screen
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On the Solution Architecture screen (Figure 6), specify your desired solution deployment choices.
Note that to generate a template you must specify the “Blade Server c-Class Solution” as the platform
preference. Additionally, you must specify a physical, rather than virtualized solution. While the sizer
supports creating virtualized (Hyper-V R2) solutions, creating an IO template to deploy these is not
currently supported.
Figure 6 – Solution Architecture screen
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In the case shown earlier in Figure 5 (high availability solution required is True), the sizer will already
have selected (mandated) that SAN FC storage be used, as shown above. If, however, you set HA to
false, the sizer would then have pre-selected the overall “Sizer recommendation” option by default,
and you will need to explicitly select the “Configure SAN fibre channel storage” option as shown in
Figure 7.
Figure 7 – Storage Architecture screen
Once the storage architecture information has been set, press the finish button on the bottom of the
sizer screen (not shown above) and the sizing process will run. On the results page you will see the
button to generate the IO XML file. This can be selected and the XML file saved to your system. This
XML file can then be copied to your HP Insight Dynamics management server and imported into the
HP IO Designer interface. This is described in greater detail in the Importing the XML template section.
Notes and limitations
There are some limitations that are important to understand about the way the IO template files are
generated and some limitations that exist in the final XML file that is generated.
First, the SharePoint sizer does not currently support configuring a boot-from-SAN (BFS) design –
however a boot LUN is a requirement for each server role that is configured in an IO template. Thus,
as part of the XML file creation process, a 40GB boot LUN is automatically added to each server.
Further, there are several key areas of the IO template that are not automatically generated as part of
the sizing process. These include the network resources and the OS deployment jobs. Both the
network information and applicable OS deployment jobs are specific to your specific environment
and thus cannot be automatically generated as part of the sizing process. These attributes will
therefore need to be added and modified after the IO template file is imported. These procedures are
covered in the Importing the XML template section below.
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Importing the XML template
The Import option within the HP IO Designer can be used to import the SharePoint-sizer generated
XML file as a service template. An example of what the template looks like after import is shown in
Figure 8 below. (Items have been moved on the screen to make the picture more compact and easier
to view).
Figure 8 – Imported template file from SharePoint 2007 sizing session
In this example the “Validation Status” shows a red cross icon, and there are six resources which
have been marked as having an error (red highlighted boxes). Three of the errors, related to the Boot
LUNs, are because there is no OS deployment job associated with the server groups. The network
resources for this solution are also not present (as they are not added by the SharePoint sizer). These
resources must be added and the OS deployment jobs set appropriately before the template can be
published successfully. More detail on each of these areas is covered below.
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Modifying the OS deployment job
Navigate to the Configure Storage screen and click on the Software tab to modify the OS deployment
event (Figure 9).
Figure 9 – Software configuration tab
Once the appropriate deployment job has been set (or “Manual software deployment” selected),
press Save to save the changes. Repeat this procedure for the other server groups in the IO template.
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Adding network resources
Once the software properties have been configured for each server group, the next step is to add the
network resources into the template. For this example configuration, four networks will be configured
– FrontEnd (Clients-to-WFEs network), Production (WFEs-to-SQL and back-end network), Prod1 (used
for maintenance and backups) and Heatbeat (cluster integrity check heartbeat). After the networks
have been added and configured, a green check box should appear for the “Validation status”. This
indicates that the template is error free (see the orange circle in Figure 10 below).
Figure 10 – SharePoint service template
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At this point you have a valid template which can be saved and published. However, there are two
other aspects of the template that you may want to modify depending upon your environment
including:
 Setting “Matching tags” on the storage resource definitions to match the property values with the
Logical Storage Pool Entries (SPEs)
 Attaching embedded HP Operations Orchestration (OO) workflows to execute as part of the service
provisioning process
Further information on these subjects can be found in the HP Insight Dynamics product documentation.
Note:
Even after modifying the necessary service template attributes and
publishing the template, the template cannot be provisioned unless the
necessary resources exist in your environment. When a user attempts to
create a service based on this template, the first step that runs is a
validation algorithm that checks that all the necessary resources (servers,
storage, and networks) specified in the template are available. If the
resources are available, they are reserved, and the provisioning process
commences. If the resources are not available, then the allocation halts,
and the service creation fails indicating which resource caused the failure.
Summary
By leveraging the capability of the “HP Sizer for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007” to generate the
HP Insight Dynamics infrastructure orchestration templates, you can save valuable time when
designing and building service template for SharePoint. With the SharePoint sizer, you can
dynamically build XML files based on your specific SharePoint solution requirements. These files can
then be directly imported into the HP IO Designer interface to be further modified and published to the
self-service portal for provisioning.
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For more information
The following links provide more information on Microsoft SharePoint Server solution content
available from HP.
HP ActiveAnswers and Sizer download, www.hp.com/solutions/activeanswers/sharepoint
Microsoft/HP SharePoint solutions page, www.hp.com/solutions/microsoft/sharepoint
HP Insight Dynamics Reference Architectures, www.hp.com/go/idvsera
The following links provide general information on the technologies discussed in this guide.
HP BladeSystem Matrix, www.hp.com/go/matrix
HP BladeSystem Matrix Application Templates, www.hp.com/go/matrixtemplates
HP BladeSystem, www.hp.com/go/bladesystem
HP Insight Control Software, www.hp.com/go/insightcontrol
HP Insight Dynamics, www.hp.com/go/insightdynamics
HP Insight Orchestration, www.hp.com/go/insightorchestration
HP Operations Orchestration, www.hp.com/go/OO
For more information about Virtual Connect technology, see the technology brief titled “HP Virtual
Connect technology for the HP BladeSystem c-Class”,
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00814156/c00814156.pdf.
For more information about Flex-10 technology, see the technology brief “HP Flex-10 technology”,
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01608922/c01608922.pdf.
To help us improve our documents, please provide feedback at
http://h20219.www2.hp.com/ActiveAnswers/us/en/solutions/technical_tools_feedback.html.
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