How many characters should have a password in order to be considered safe?
Office 365 limits the password lenght for users not synchronized with on-premise Active Directories to 16 characters. Can this considered to be safe?
Office 365 administrators need to be aware of the fact that the new Administrative Tools do not show a warning when a new user is created. When pasting an initial password into the textbox, no warning is displayed. But the password itself is already shortend to 16 characters automatically.
The summary page shows the shortend password after the new user has been created. The administrator needs to pay proper attention to the status summary to notice the shortend password.
When logging in for the first time the user experience is different. The user is notified that the password cannot exceed 16 characters.
Microsoft should rethink the limitiation of 16 characters to enhance the security level for user logon.
Today's virtualization options provide a wide variety to even virtualize business critical enterprise applications. Distributed enterprise applications can easily be virtualized but require a proper planning. Otherwise you will end up with virtualized SharePoint Server Farm that does not scale well and perform badly.
This article will provide information on how to virtualize your production environment properly and will not necessarily cover development environments, as those tend to run in over-committed scenarios anyway.
The following table provide a simple overview on the SharePoint farm terminology:
Never ever start a SharePoint production deployment with a single multi-role SharePoint Server.
The following figure illustrates the architecture of a SharePoint Server 2013 environment example.
Capacity and Performance : These two key aspects are the most important aspects when you plan your SharePoint virtualization infrastructure. You need to plan for enough disk capacity to host all of the content databases and data that is cached to disk by the web server and application server roles. Your overall capacity should be planned at least for a three year period. The requirements for CPU and memory sizing of the virtual hosts depends on your server requirements. A virtual host should always be equipped to the physical maximum. If you leave CPU sockets empty, there is no guarantee that you will get the CPU for that socket in the future. The memory banks should be filled in the proper ratio per CPU as well. Otherwise you will not be able to fully benefit from the virtualization of your servers.
Mostly all of the major vendors of hardware load balancers offer virtualized load balancers as well. As long as the virtual load balancer is not running on an over-committed host, and sufficient performance is provided, there is no legitimate reason to not virtualize a load balancer.
Especially when you maintain a large virtualization platform you are heavily interested to not add additional hardware complexity to your network infrastructure by adding hardware load balancers. Any additional layer of complexity adds an additional layer for support as well.
Some of the major vendors are (purely alphabetical):
Web servers are easy to scale, because web server generally provide a much better performance by adding additional CPUs and memory resources. This is the reason why the web server role within a SharePoint deployment is the easiest to scale out. Because it is so easy to just add additional resources it is not automatically the right approach. Performance-wise you will reach a point where adding an additional web server makes more sense. This decision if you extend the resources of an existing server or add a new virtual machine depends on the overall virtualization infrastructure and the available hardware resources.
Another important topic to think about is the migration of virtual machines between hosts and the high-availability functionality of your virtualization platform. A virtual machine can be moved between virtual host more quickly when the virtual machine is not over-sized. The larger the assigned resources are, the more time it takes to migrate a virtual machine. You need to keep this in mind not only for migrations due to maintenance reasons or virtual hosts fail-overs. The same is true when you utilize the automatic load balancing of virtual machines.
NUMA nodes are an additional important topic. Microsoft provides dedicated informations to NUMA nodes SharePoint here. Even though that the article is focusing in Hyper-V, the general NUMA node requirements are valid for other hyper-visor platforms as well. As per Microsoft performance can decrease by up to 8% when a virtual machines needs to access remote memory from another NUMA node.
The proper sizing of memory resources ensures that your web servers perform as expected. You need to ensure that the web server does not require to swap memory and make heavy use of the page file. Any use of the page file results in unnecessary disk I/O. And depending on the disk sub system the required I/O reduces the performance dramatically. Even though that the operating system supports hot-adding of virtual memory, not all application functions make use of added virtual memory. Some components recognized available memory during start-up of the operating system and do not adjust themselves during run time (e.g. Distributed Cache).
Your SharePoint server running the web server role should be configured with at least:
The CPU demand of SharePoint application servers depends heavily on the applications that are running on those servers. Some application might be more CPU resource intensive (e.g. Search), others might be more memory intensive. To find the proper sizing for your specific requirements you need to monitor the system resources not only on a general level (e.g. System CPU usage, system memory consumption), but on a more granular level (per service, per application pool, per worker process).
Your SharePoint server running the application server role should be configured with at least:
The virtualization of SQL Server is a separate topic that will be covered in more detail in a separate blog article. But it would be unfair to leave this section more or less empty.
First of all it should be said that even SQL Server can be virtualized. If virtualizing SQL Server is an option for your IT infrastructure depends on the SQL Server and data warehouse design of your company. Some companies prefer to host SQL databases in central SQL Servers serving all data application within the company. Other companies prefer to host SQL databases on different SQL servers and group those by SQL Server SLA and/or by the type of data stored in databases.
In this example we assume that there are three SQL Server 2012 dedicated to SharePoint in use. The following table gives a brief overview of the recommended memory sizing for SQL Server virtual machines:
SQL Server 2012 provides a new functionality called AlwaysOn Availability Groups (AAG). The AAG provides a much better experience and performance when it comes to database fail-overs. But at the same time you need to plan resource requirements in a different way than you were used to with classic Windows Clustering capabilities. An AAG does have a primary replica of a database and many secondary (passive) replicas of the same database.
AGGs can be operated in two different availability modes:
In our example we have two different AlwaysOn Availability Groups configured:
The SharePoint 2013 farm example ends up in the follow virtual host demands:
3 x 100 GB (OS, SQL Server) 3 x 1 TB (Databases)
To be able to have a single virtual host in maintenance, but still have redundancy we need to plan for at least three virtual hosts. But even in this case one of the two can fail. Therefore you need to protect yourself from a failure while having on virtual host in maintenance. The disk subsystem is connected to each host by fibre channel or iSCSI on a dedicated 10GB network.
The mailbox default folders like Inbox or Sent Items are labeled depending on the locale settings of the mailbox.
Mailbox users are able to change the default user names by changing the primary language of the Office setup and starting Outlook with the command line parameter /resetfoldernames.
The same can be achieved by the Exchange Administrator by running the Exchange cmdlet Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration.
When moving mailbox content to a new Exchange mailbox using a PST export/import approach it is important (besides other things) that the export and import mailbox locale match. Otherwise you will end up with new folders being imported into the target mailbox. Folders are being mapped by the folder name during import.
The following screenshot shows the default folders of the mailbox in the locale de-DE.
The regional configuration settings can be checked on the Exchange Server.
[PS] C:\>Get-Mailbox askywalker | Get-MailboxRegionalConfiguration | fl
RunspaceId : f739bd99-9940-4dcf-abd5-6de080ac312d DateFormat : dd.MM.yyyyLanguage : de-DE
DefaultFolderNameMatchingUserLanguage : False TimeFormat : HH:mm TimeZone : W. Europe Standard Time Identity : contoso.com/Test/Anakin Skywalker IsValid : True ObjectState : New
Changing the default folder names to en-US is straight forward.
[PS] C:\>Get-Mailbox askywalker | Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration -LocalizeDefaultFolderName:$true -Language en-us
The changes are reflected in Outlook without restarting Outlook.
RunspaceId : f739bd99-9940-4dcf-abd5-6de080ac312d DateFormat : M/d/yyyy Language : en-US DefaultFolderNameMatchingUserLanguage : False TimeFormat : h:mm tt TimeZone : W. Europe Standard Time Identity : contoso.com/Test/Anakin Skywalker IsValid : True ObjectState : New
When you now try to revert the configuration to de-DE receive an error that the locale does not match the current date and time format. This is even more interesting that the cmdlet was not complaining about the same issue when converting to the en-US locale.
[PS] C:\>Get-Mailbox askywalker | Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration -LocalizeDefaultFolderName:$true -Language de-de
DateFormat "M/d/yyyy" isn't valid for current language setting "de-DE". Valid formats include "dd.MM.yyyy, dd.MM.yy, yyyy-MM-dd, dd. MMM. yyyy". + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (contoso.com/Test/Anakin Skywalker:ADObjectId) [Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration], DataValidationException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : [Server=CT01,RequestId=3bcd1191-c547-45ec-a7ad-dc5e8a1e34db,TimeStamp=05.02.2014 11:19:11] [FailureCategory=Cmdlet-DataValidationException] 2161B69F,Microsoft.Exchange.Management.StoreTasks.SetMailboxRegionalConfiguration + PSComputerName : CT01.contoso.com The TimeFormat "h:mm tt" isn't valid for current language setting "de-DE". Valid formats include "HH:mm, HH:mm' Uhr'". + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (contoso.com/Test/Anakin Skywalker:ADObjectId) [Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration], DataValidationException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : [Server=CT01,RequestId=3bcd1191-c547-45ec-a7ad-dc5e8a1e34db,TimeStamp=05.02.2014 11:19:11] [FailureCategory=Cmdlet-DataValidationException] D603E2E8,Microsoft.Exchange.Management.StoreTasks.SetMailboxRegionalConfiguration + PSComputerName : CT01.contoso.com
To successfully convert back to the de-DE locale it is required to specify a valid date and time format for the target locale.
[PS] C:\>Get-Mailbox askywalker | Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration -LocalizeDefaultFolderName:$true -Language de-de -DateFormat dd.MM.yyyy -TimeFormat HH:mm
When setting the regional time zone information, the time zone name must be used. A Granikos FAQ post lists the available time zones.
If you ever wanted to know about the license requirements, architectural tasks and even the IT Pro responsibilities for the different Exchange Server 2013 deployment options, you can find the answer now in the the Exchange 2013 Platform Options poster.
The single page poster summarizes the most important topics and answers the most important questions for the four deployment options:
Even further links are provided using QR-Codes.
Link
All attendees of the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) in Austin received a printed version of the updated Exchange Server 2013 SP1 architecture poster.
Just three weeks after the conference the architecture poster is available for public download as well.
The architecture poster is a valuable source of information, not only for the Exchange experts.