Using RBS with SMSP

[adriancwilson]

Hi,

I am looking to enable RBS for a SharePoint 2010 installation. I was propsoing to install a couple of SMSP platforms (virtual machines) - 1 x for SMSP Manager and 1 x for SMSP Media server but wondered if I need to cluster the media service within a Windows cluster to provide further HA? I read somewhere that I could install multiple media servers so wondered which was the best approach?

Also I wanted to understand if I could use multiple BLOB stores and what would be the recommended maximum size from a 'best practice' perspective?

Thanks,

Adrian

[rbarker]

Hi Adrian -

In order to create Media Service HA here are the steps that you would follow:

1. Setup 2 Windows Servers (eg. Windows Server 2008 R2) called Media1 and Media2 and install the "Windows Failover Clustering" feature.
2. Install SMSP Media Service on both nodes. At this time Media1 and Media2 are registered to SMSP as its own hostname.
3. Create a shared drive for witness disk and data LUN; make sure the drive letter or mount point are the same on both nodes.
4. Create cluster application
5. Add access point for the cluster application
6. Add the media service as generic service to the cluster application
7. On host node Media1 and Media2, modify the file MedialocPropertiesConfigurations.config to change "mediaServerName" and "mediaServerHostOrIpAddress" to the name of the media cluster access point.
8. Restart the cluster application on node Media1 and Media2 so the media service with restart, after that the SMSP control panel in the Manager should see a single media server with the name of the access point.
9. Use the media service with the access point name to create the LUN device that would be used.

Your second question regarding BLOB stores is a bit more difficult to simply provide a general best practice. There are a lot of dependencies that go into figuring out the best approach to using Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) or EBS (although I don't recommend using EBS). What type of workload are you implementing RBS for? High-Collaboration? WORM? What remoting criteria are you going to use? Anything 512KB+ will be remoted off? How many versions of a document are you going to allow for Document Libraries? Always remember even though you may reduce the size of your physical database file (MDF) the total size of your database + CIFS (remoted content) is what makes up the true size of your database. Didn't mean to give you more to think about here but in the end RBS does help with performance and the provider that we ship with SMSP 6.1, 7.0, and 7.1 all work incredibly well.

Thanks,

Rob