Chapter 31. The Infrastructure
To support the designs put forth in this book, we must describe the pieces of infrastructure that are required to support this effort. This chapter discusses the physical and logical infrastructure that support the designs. The areas that we cover are:
The Environment
Web Tier
App Tier
SQL Tier
LightSwitch development system
Active Directory
SharePoint Server 2010 (Enterprise Edition)
Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011
Development environment
Application Server components
SQL Server
Analysis Services
Reporting Services
Database Services
SQL Server Licensing
As we examine each of the components, we will discuss the infrastructure requirements of each and where they fit into the scenario.
The Environment
In this book, we are using a five-machine development environment. It is important to point out that this environment is designed to simulate a separation of the operational tiers and does not reflect the performance requirements for a production environment.
For the purpose of this book, we have opted to use CloudShare to host our environment. The CloudShare infrastructure allows us to quickly spin up servers and connect them. The environment allows for 16GB of RAM, 500GB of hard drive storage, and 10 vCPUs. The drivers behind using CloudShare were:
Low price point infrastructure as a service
Ability to collaborate with multiple parties in a shared environment
Licensing included with environment pricing
Prebuilt and preconfigured development machines
Ability to snapshot single machines or the entire environment
Active Directory
The Active Directory is a single CPU virtual machine with 1GB of RAM and 100GB of hard drive space. Active Directory Domain Services and Domain Name Services roles are installed and provide for a Windows Networking Infrastructure that serves all other servers in the environment. To lower the level of complexity required when configuring the environment, this implementation is contained within a single server.
The Domain-functional level and Forest-functional level will be set to Windows Server 2008 R2 in order to take full advantage of all of the latest features provided for by Active Directory. A full list of the updated features in Active Directory between Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 can be found on TechNet in the article entitled “What’s New in Active Directory Domain Services” located here.
SharePoint Web Server
The Web Server is a dual CPU virtual machine with 3GB of RAM and 60GB of hard drive space. SharePoint 2010 is installed with Service Pack 1 and the December 2011 Cumulative Updates for SharePoint Server 2010. This server is hosting the SharePoint Web Role and servicing end user requests.
SharePoint App Server
The App Server is a dual CPU virtual machine with 6GB of RAM and 60GB of hard drive space. SharePoint 2010 is installed with Service Pack 1 and the December 2011 cumulative updates for SharePoint Server 2010. This server is hosting the SharePoint App Role and hosts the following service applications:
Excel Services
Managed Metadata
PowerPivot
Reporting Services
Search Service
Secure Store
Usage Application
Microsoft SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2010 is primarily viewed as a collaboration tool for business. At its core, it provides a set of features to allow business users to more effectively work together and collaborate on everything from documents to tasks lists. Since its introduction in 2001, it has been transformed from a little known and lightly featured web content and document management system into a dynamic, broad application development platform for the business community.
In SharePoint 2007, the concept of integrating and exposing line of business (LOB) data through SharePoint surfaced. With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft expanded this capability to incorporate the ability to not only see LOB data, but to interact, manipulate, and write back to the source system through the use of Business Connectivity Services.
In SharePoint 2007, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server was Microsoft’s BI tool for dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs), scorecards, and analytics. However, Microsoft discontinued development on the product and shifted PerformancePoint to be integrated as a part of the Enterprise features of SharePoint 2010, known as the Service Application “PerformancePoint Services.” Moving the formerly standalone and independently licensed product into SharePoint showed a true commitment by Microsoft to having SharePoint be its application platform for business intelligence.
Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011
Two components of Visual Studio 2011 are leveraged in this book: the desktop application and the server-side components.
The LightSwitch Development Environment
LightSwitch is a development tool released in 2011 by the Visual Studio team. It is a simplified, self-service tool that allows you to quickly and easily develop business applications for the desktop, on-premise web server, or the cloud. To leverage the power of Silverlight, it supports either C# or VB as its programing languages (for the purposes of this book, we are using C# as that is the language most commonly used in building SharePoint apps). LightSwitch is a part of the Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and can be seamlessly integrated with Visual Studio for developers who are already using that toolset.
LightSwitch gives you the ability to design simple, elegant screens quickly that can be made extremely intuitive to your users and integrate into the authentication scheme that is already in place (in the form of Active Directory or Forms Authentication) to enable you to secure your application in such a way that users are only allowed to see what you want them to see.
With both built-in and downloadable templates and starter kits, LightSwitch gets you building applications in hours/days rather than weeks/months. Using model-based design, you are able to make changes that effect the entire application and do not require you to find every screen where a specific code change would reside.
The database design is simple and straightforward and allows you to create powerful structured datasets that will be fed by your application with little effort.
Once built, applications in LightSwitch are deployed to a web server hosting the LightSwitch web services and can be visualized as a client-side application, a web-hosted application, or through SharePoint in an iframe to seamlessly integrate into your existing portal strategy.
LightSwitch Server Runtime Components
LightSwitch requires server-side components to be installed on a web server to host the IIS site that will render the LightSwitch application on the web. In our scenario, we identified the App Server as the hosting machine for our LightSwitch applications.
Leveraging IIS 7.5 and the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, we installed and configured the Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 Server Runtime without local SQL.
SQL Server
SQL Server is a required component of the SharePoint platform. For the purposes of this book, we utilized a full edition of SQL Server 2008 R2 to provide for SharePoint’s back-end hosting of content and configuration databases. To support the BI features however, we need to look to the newer release of SQL Server, as you will read next.
Note
It is vital to keep in mind at this point that this book is being written during a time where SQL Server BI is being actively developed. It is important that you visit Microsoft’s TechNet and understand the latest updates in each service pack and cumulative update to understand their impact on the BI stack. Specifically, for SharePoint 2013, it is required to have a minimum of SQL Server 2012 SP1 running to support the examples in this book.
SQL Server Analysis Services
With the release of SQL Server 2012, we now get two distinct modes of running SQL Server Analysis Services: multidimensional and tabular. For the purpose of this book we examine only tabular.
Tabular models are in-memory databases in Analysis Services. The xVelocity in-memory analytics engine allows for very fast access to tabular model objects and data by reporting client applications.
There are two modes for accessing data in tabular models: Cached mode and DirectQuery mode. In Cached mode, you can integrate data from multiple sources including relational databases, data feeds, and flat text files. The examples used in this book reference Cached mode only.
SQL Reporting Services
SQL Reporting Services has long been a method of choice for reporting on SQL-based housed data surfaced in SharePoint using Reporting Services Integrated Mode, however it can also be used to report on data from the likes of Oracle, Teradata, SAP, and SQL Azure. The integration with SharePoint has come a long way and now allows scheduling report delivery, alerting on changes to reports, as well as the new Report Builder 3.0 for ad hoc reporting.
SQL Server Database Engine
In an effort to simplify our solution, we opted to utilize SQL Server 2008 R2 for the housing of SharePoint Server 2010 configuration, content databases, and custom application databases. While SQL Server 2012 has proven to be a stable and optimized database platform, due to the timing of writing this book we decided to follow a model that more of the population will be living in the near future.
Part of the beauty of the SQL Server 2012 story around SharePoint for business intelligence is the ability to continue running your SharePoint environment on SQL Server 2008 R2 and simply upgrade the piece of functionality on the App Tier to SQL Server 2012 until you are ready to do the larger scale migration.
SQL Server Licensing
As SQL Server 2012 is required for the efforts in this book, it is important to understand the license mode that you will need to support these efforts. Effective December 1, 2012, Microsoft changed the standard licensing model for SQL Server from a socket-based license to a core-based licensing model. This means that you will need to license all of your SQL Cores, not just the number of processors in your SQL Server. With this change Microsoft simplified its SQL licensing to three models: Standard edition, BI edition, and Enterprise edition.
The Standard and Enterprise editions use the core-based licensing model referred to in the previous paragraph. The BI edition however reverts to a previous model known as “Server plus CAL.” This licensing model allows you to purchase a lower priced Server license; however, it requires a Client Access Licence (CAL) for each user who will access the system. This model will prove more cost-effective for companies who will have fewer BI users in their environment, but there is a point at which you reach diminishing returns based upon the number of users you have on the “Server plus CAL” licensing model and will find it more cost-effective to switch to the core-based licensing model.
As one might guess, all of the BI goodness that we discussed in this book requires either the BI edition or Enterprise edition. The reason that Microsoft implemented the “Server plus CAL” model for BI specifically is that they believe that the BI features are powerful and should be made more accessible to companies who may not be able to afford the Enterprise licensing.
Summary
In this chapter, we described the pieces of infrastructure that are required to support the efforts outlined in this book. This chapter discussed the physical and logical infrastructure that support the designs. The areas that we covered were the Environment, SharePoint Server 2010, Visual Studio LightSwitch, and SQL Server.
We examined each of the components, the infrastructure requirements of each, where they fit into the scenario, and lastly we explained the SQL Server licensing model and the requirements for the solutions in this book.