Designing a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Infrastructure Vol 2 part 21 ppt

MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
Designing a Maintenance and Monitoring Plan 13-5
Documentation
Detailed documentation simplifies monitoring and maintenance throughout the
hierarchy. It ensures that the maintenance and monitoring processes that you
define are repeatable. It is also easy to review and update the details of your
maintenance and monitoring plan if you document it. Documenting the plan is
especially important in large hierarchies where there can be many SharePoint 2010
administrators and other IT teams all working to meet SLAs for the IT
infrastructure. When you design your maintenance and monitoring plan, you
should liaise with other IT teams, such as the teams that are responsible for the
following services:
• Active Directory® directory service
• Internet Information Services (IIS)
• Microsoft SQL Server®

SharePoint 2010 relies on all of these services, so you must ensure that your
maintenance and monitoring plan incorporates any tasks that are necessary to
maintain and monitor them.
You can provide the plan document to the SharePoint 2010 administrators who
are responsible for maintenance.
Your plan should include:
• Which tasks to perform.
• How to perform each task.
• How often to perform each task.
• Who should perform each task.
• Who should update and maintain the necessary documentation.

Additional Reading
For a sample SLA, see Appendix B: Sample SLA at

MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
13-6 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Planning for Quality Assurance

Key Points
QA refers to a program for the systematic monitoring and evaluation of the various
aspects of a service to ensure that you meet agreed standards of quality. QA
programs vary, but they focus on improving and stabilizing the service that you
provide and minimizing issues that lead to interruptions in service.
Many service management methodologies incorporate QA processes. The
following sections describe some examples.
ITIL
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of concepts and practices for the
development, management, and provision of IT services. ITIL gives detailed
descriptions of a number of important IT practices and provides comprehensive
checklists, tasks, and procedures that any IT organization can tailor to its
requirements.
MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
Designing a Maintenance and Monitoring Plan 13-7
MOF
Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0 delivers practical guidance for
everyday IT practices and activities. It helps you to establish and implement
reliable, cost-effective IT services.
MOF covers the entire IT life cycle by integrating:
• Community-generated processes for planning, delivering, operating, and
managing IT.
• Governance, risk, and compliance activities.
• Management reviews.
• Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) best practices.

Sample QA Program
As an example, consider the QA processes that you require for the backup and
recovery of your SharePoint 2010 infrastructure. You should define the following:
• SLAs. You should formalize expectations as to which data you can recover and
how long it will take you to recover it. This may vary from site to site in your
SharePoint 2010 infrastructure. This information should be part of the SLA
documentation.
• Backup schedule. Your maintenance and monitoring plan should include a
defined schedule for backup. You should define what you will back up—such
as content and metadata—along with schedules for backup. Again, the backup
schedule will vary depending on the data that you must back up.
• Restore verification procedure. Your maintenance and monitoring plan should
include processes for verifying your backups. You should verify that the
backup and restore process will work by testing a selection of backups on a
regular basis.
• Offsite storage. Many organizations use offsite storage as an added level of
protection for their data. If you plan to use offsite storage, you should
incorporate QA processes for your supplier. For example, does the offsite
storage vendor have the appropriate certification to hold your data securely?


MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
13-8 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Additional Reading
For more information about MOF 4.0, see


MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
Designing a Maintenance and Monitoring Plan 13-9
Change Management

Key Points
Change management is a key process in service management. Change management
provides a way for you to track changes that are made in your organization,
whether in IT or any other part of the business.
The objective of change
management is to ensure that people who make changes use standardized
methods and procedures for all changes to the IT infrastructure. The use of
standardized methods and procedures minimizes the number and impact of any
unexpected results of the change. You should also include standardized
procedures for the rollback of any changes.
Externally imposed requirements, such as compliance with legal regulations, may
lead to changes in your SharePoint 2010 infrastructure. Alternatively, the impetus
for change may come from the need to improve efficiency and effectiveness or
enable new business initiatives. Whatever the cause, you will be able to handle all
changes in an efficient and prompt manner if you implement change management
by using standardized methods and procedures. Well-defined change management
also helps you to maintain the balance between the need for change and the
potential impact of changes.
MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
13-10 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Monitoring and maintaining your SharePoint 2010 infrastructure will include
making changes such as applying service packs, changing user permissions, or
moving content. Change management helps you to make changes in a controlled,
predictable manner.
Change Management Policies
When you develop your maintenance and monitoring plan, you should
incorporate change management policies. Change management policies define the
standardized methods and procedures for changes to the environment. For
example, your change management policies can mandate that you test custom

SharePoint 2010 solutions in a staging farm before you move them to the
production farm.
You should make the following features part of your change management policy:
• Document and control change management
procedures.
• Create a formal process for requesting changes and recording these change
requests.
• Assess and document the effect of the requested change.
• Impose controls on changes.
• Create an emergency change process for errors and other issues that
significantly impair system function and business operations or increase the
system’s vulnerability.
• Update change documentation when necessary.
• Record maintenance tasks and changes.
• Apply controls to new SharePoint 2010 solutions. You can use your
SharePoint 2010 staging environment or sandboxing to ensure that new
solutions do not behave in a detrimental manner.
• Submit changes for approval.
• Separate responsibility for creation, approval, and application by assigning
them to different personnel to avoid changes that you do not want.
• Monitor changes to assess the efficacy of
change management policies.


MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
Designing a Maintenance and Monitoring Plan 13-11
Lesson 2
Creating a Maintenance Plan for SharePoint
2010

Creating a maintenance plan will help you to manage the most at-risk elements of
SharePoint 2010. By automating maintenance tasks, you can ensure that regular
tasks are performed as scheduled. Your maintenance plan should also include a
plan for deploying software updates that meets the requirements of the
organization’s change management policies. You should also include maintenance
policies for the different SharePoint 2010 environments in your organization,
because the staging and development environments will have different
maintenance requirements from the production environment.
Objectives
After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
• Describe considerations for automating maintenance tasks in SharePoint 2010.
• List guidelines for managing diagnostic log files in SharePoint 2010.
MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
13-12 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
• Develop a plan for deploying software updates.
• Describe policies for staging and development environments.
• Discuss guidelines for developing a maintenance plan.


MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
Designing a Maintenance and Monitoring Plan 13-13
Considerations for Automating Maintenance Responses

Key Points
You can automate maintenance tasks to improve your ability to respond to
maintenance requirements in a timely fashion. It also enables you to manage
regular tasks proactively.
You can use a number of tools to help you to automate your regular maintenance
tasks. The following sections will discuss the use of Windows PowerShell™ and
timer jobs.

Windows PowerShell
Windows PowerShell is a command-line shell and scripting language that helps IT
professionals to achieve greater control and productivity. You can use Windows
PowerShell to manipulate Web applications, site collections, sites, lists, and almost
any aspect of SharePoint 2010 administration. Windows PowerShell is excellent
for automating maintenance tasks. For example, you can use Windows PowerShell
to create scheduled tasks for site collection backups.
You should use Windows PowerShell when you perform command-line
administrative tasks, rather than the deprecated Stsadm command-line tool. The
MCT USE ONLY. STUDENT USE PROHIBITED
13-14 Designing a Microsoft® SharePoint® 2010 Infrastructure
Stsadm command-line tool is included in SharePoint 2010 to support
compatibility with previous product versions.
Timer Jobs
A timer job is a trigger to start to run a specific Windows® operating system service
for Microsoft Office SharePoint. It contains a definition of the service to run and
specifies how frequently the service should start. Some services rely on timer jobs
to run according to a schedule. You can view the status of timer jobs that have
been run by using the Central Administration Web site or Windows PowerShell.
The monitoring features in SharePoint 2010 use specific timer jobs to perform
monitoring tasks and collect monitoring data. This health and usage data may
consist of performance counter data, event log data, search usage data, or various
performance aspects of the Web servers. The system uses this data to create health
reports, Web Analysis reports, and administrative reports. The system writes usage
and health data to the logging folder and to the logging database.
Additional Reading
For more information about SharePoint 2010 products administration by using
Windows PowerShell, see

For more information about SharePoint 2010 timer jobs, see