Workflow Manager

Workflow Manager Disaster Recovery – Preparations

Introduction This is the first “real” posts in the Workflow Manager Disaster Recovery series. In this post I will show you what you need to do to prepare for Disaster Recovery (DR) situations when working with Workflow Manager and Service Bus. The obvious Let’s start with the obvious pieces. You should run your Workflow Manager farm on three (3) servers (for more on this discussion see the SPC356 session). Running on three servers are important not just for high-availability it might save you from going into DR mode. DR should be considered as the last resort. You should also consider one or more SQL Server high-availability options, more on this later.

Workflow Manager

Workflow Manager Disaster Recovery and Restore options series

Introduction Welcome to a new series of blog posts in which we will focus on the Disaster and Recovery (DR) routines for Workflow Manager 1.0 in combination with SharePoint 2013. During SharePoint Conference 2013 me and SharePoint sensei Spencer Harbar presented a session called “Designing, deploying, and managing Workflow Manager farms” (watch the video recording). During that session we discussed different DR options for Workflow Manager and the Service Bus and we got tons of questions on that specific topic. We did not have time to go into details and we did not show any of the necessary scripts/routines you need to do when restoring a Workflow Farm or Workflow Scopes, and there is very little information available on that topic on the interwebs – so that is why this new blog series is being posted.

Workflow Manager

Issue when installing Workflow Manager 1.0 Refresh using PowerShell

Introduction When using the Web Platform Installer to download and/or install Workflow Manager you can no longer download and install Workflow Manager 1.0 and Workflow Manager 1.0 CU1. The only option is to download Workflow Manager 1.0 Refresh (which essentially is CU2). So when installing a new Workflow Manager farm for SharePoint or just because you want to rock some workflows you have to use Workflow Manager (WFM) 1.0 Refresh. Unless you’ve been smart and previously downloaded and saved the original Workflow Manager. When using WFM 1.0 Refresh you also need to download Service Bus 1.1.

SharePoint 2013

Sharing a Workflow Manager 1.0 farm between multiple SharePoint 2013 farms

SharePoint 2013 introduces a whole set of new and improved features. One of the things that is both new and vastly improved is the Workflow platform. Workflow is no longer a part of the SharePoint core infrastructure, but instead a separate server product. Even though ye olde Workflow platform, 2010 style, is still in the product for backwards compatibility. SharePoint 2013 leverages the Azure service called Workflow Manager 1.0. (Not the cloud version but a local on-premises installation).