Error occurred in deployment step Add Solution

Unlike what I’m telling about myself on my About page (this is a no-code blog), I shall write more and more development orientated posts :-). I have tried to deploy a solution with CAS policies directly from Visual Studio 2010 to SharePoint with the new SharePoint Developer Tools.

The Deploy failed with the error “error occurred in deployment step Add Solution: Property set method not found”

Thanks to my colleague Waldek Mastykarz this is resolved. Go to his blog here to see the solution.

Tags: SP2010, VS2010

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Output cache and load balancer problem

At the moment I am troubleshooting a very slow (response times of 10+ seconds monitored with Fiddler) responding SharePoint 2007 intranet at a customer.  At first we thought that the problems where caused by network traffic from SharePoint to SQL because this was routed through the load balancer (Windows 2008 NLB). We configured the route tables on the SharePoint servers but this only caused a slight improvement in performance.

We also saw that object and output cache were both not configured on the site collections. So we also configured both the cache options. Object cache with a size of 200MB per site collection and a refresh time of 600 seconds. Output cache was switched on with the verified cache profile option set to Intranet. Almost immediately after these configurations were done, the helpdesk received lots of phone calls by users. The users reported that it seemed that they were logged on as an other user. After switching off output cache this was solved.

This Technet article also describes the limitations of NLB combined with output caching:

When used with two or more Web servers, output caching might affect consistency. You can configure a cache profile not to check for updates for each request and, for example, configure the profile to ignore changes to the version of the Web page in the output cache until 60 seconds after the original page is updated. If you have two Web servers in your topology, and depending on the load balancer used to route the user’s request, a reader might see inconsistent content if the page is rendered by one server and then a later request is routed to a second server within that 60-second window.

Tags: Infrastructure, performance

View the original article here

SharePoint backup restore and virtualization support

At the moment I have to write a SharePoint backup and restore document and planning for my clients SharePoint farms. All together, production and non-production, there are 10 SharePoint farms.

At first I thought, this is a very straightforward document about what parts of SharePoint and/or file system to backup and restore. After some search queries on the internet I read that virtualization is also very important. I knew that already off course but I did not know what is or is not supported by Microsoft.

Some quotes on the internet:

“Do not use the Hyper-V snapshot feature on virtual servers that are connected to a SharePoint Products and Technologies server farm. This is because the timer services and the search applications might become unsynchronized during the snapshot process.”

“As a best practice, we recommend that you do not use the snapshot feature on virtual machines in a production environment.”

There are all sorts of SharePoint farms at the client. Complete virtual server farms, combined virtual and physical server farms and complete physical server farms. Considering this, there should also be different recovery scenarios. Maybe I will discuss the different scenarios is another article later on, but for the moment I will give you all the information I have read about virtualization support.

SharePoint farm Backup/Restore with VMware Snapshots: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepoint2010setup/thread/e5abf633-9023-4f24-a707-2680cced28e8
Virtualizing SharePoint Server 2007 Series:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/uksharepoint/archive/2009/02/26/virtualizing-sharepoint-series-introduction.aspx
Best practices for virtualization (SharePoint Server 2010):
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh295699.aspx
Virtual machine guidance (SharePoint Server 2010):
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff621103.aspx

Update 12/22/2011

Resource Center Virtualization for SharePoint Server 2010:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff602849.aspx
Server Virtualization Validation Program:
http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvp.htm

Tags: backup & restore, Virtualization

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Converting SharePoint license trouble

At a customer I was building a demo site to convince the management of the power of SharePoint 2010. The plan was to show some fancy stuff with Visio Graphics Services, Infopath Forms, workflows etc. For this we needed, obviously, the Enterprise license. So I opened CA, browsed to the Manage service applications part to make a new Visio Graphics Service Application… The next image indicated this was not possible. My conclusion was that a Standard license was installed (duh).

But I’m stubborn and looked to the Upgrade and Migration part of CA because I was not sure that the Standard license was used at installation. The Convert License Type page showed me this:

Hmmmm…strange, I thought that the license type should show up here.

So I also looked at Upgrade and Migration > Enable Enterprise Features (see below, first image) and Enable Features on existing sites (below, second image).

The page “Enable features on existing sites” says that the Standard features can be enabled what should indicate that a Standard license is used, but the “Enable Enterprise features” page indicates the opposite. Confused…
So I wanted to know another way to check the license type. My colleague Waldek Mastykarz (http://blog.mastykarz.nl) told me to look into the registry on the SharePoint server at this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Registration\{90140000-110D-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE}

Clicking on the key DigitalProductID indicated the license is a MOSS FIS Enterprise license (see below).

But…this should not be a reason for all the vague licensing information SharePoint shows. So Waldek found a kb article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2143810) about FIS licenses that do not activate all product features. When I executed the PowerShell commandlet for the GUID on the SharePoint server, one of the GUIDs from the kb article showed up. So all this indicated a (more or less) valid license was used, but it was too old.
The client will take further steps and will reinstall the SharePoint Farm with another license.

Tags: license, SP2010

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Move IIS7 root script

In my previous post I indicated that the VirtualDirectory Path of the SharePoint Central Administration Web Application in a configuration file was incorrect. I have found the source of this error.

Before I started the SP2010 installation I decided to move the inetpub directory to another drive. I searched for this on the internet and found a script to do this. Unfortunately there was an error in this script which added a second backslash (”\”) to the VirtualDirectory Path.

At first I did not know what caused this error so I searched in the registry. There I found the registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\InetStp) where IIS stores the location of the WWWROOT. (see below)

The double backslashes where caused by an error in the script that I used to move the inetpub directory from C: to D:. If you also used the moveIIS7root.bat script which I found here, you can download the correct version here. I made changes in lines 46 and 47 (changed %moveto%\inetpub to %moveto%inetpub).

UPDATE August 31, 2011

Also check the Advanced Settings in IIS per website (see below).

Here you also have to change the Physical Path (see below)

Tags: IIS, Registry, SP2010

View the original article here