Tuesday, April 17, 2012

User Profile Service Redundancy in SharePoint 2010

For those looking to implement load balancing of the User Profile Service on two application servers within the same SharePoint 2010 farm, while providing failover in case one server goes down or needs to go offline, it’s a fairly easy thing to configure. Simply start the User Profile Service on a second application server in the farm. If the first application server goes down, or if you manually stop the User Profile Service on the first application server, the second application server will assume hosting operations for the User Profile Service. The User Profile Synchronization Service, however, can only be started on one application server within a farm at any given time. Therefore, in the case of a failover to the second application server, the User Profile Synchronization Service must be manually started on the second application server to continue profile synchronization. No biggie really.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Billy,

    Thank you very much for this information. It was very useful for me because we are looking for a way to implement User Profile Service redundancy in our SharePoint farms.
    But I've encountered a problem when I've tried to run the User Profile Service on the second server, Web Front End.
    Since that, the timer job "User Profile Service Application — User Profile Incremental Synchronization" tries to start on that Web Front End server and fails, because User Profile Synchronization Service runs on the other server.
    Did you encounter the same problem?

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  2. Hmm, no I did not experience that issue. I would ensure your SharePoint 2010 farm is on Service Pack 1 and December 2012 CU.

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff800847.aspx

    Good luck!

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