Sharepoint 2013 : Service Application Administration (part 3) - Managing Service Application Proxy Groups

Managing Service Application Proxy Groups

Now that you know how useful these groups are, this section demonstrates how to manage and consume them. After a brief walk through the GUI tools, we’ll take a look at some of the hardcore things you can do with the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.

Using Your Mouse to Manage Groups

Put that mouse to work with the following steps:

The Service Application Associations page displays a list of all your service applications and the application proxy group with which each one is associated. This is where all that terminology you studied comes in handy. You already know that application proxy group means service application groups, and that application proxies really mean service application connections. The nice thing about this page is you can now click on one of the proxy groups to change its connections if necessary. For example, if you wanted to remove HR-Only Metadata from the default group, this is how you would do it:

Now all the web applications associated with the default service application group will no longer have access to the HR-Only Metadata service application.

When you first accessed the Configure Service Application Associations screen, you may have noticed that because you have multiple Managed Metadata service applications in your farm, one appears as [default] and the other(s) appear as [set as default], as shown in Figure 7.

FIGURE 7

This is because you can associate multiple Managed Metadata service applications with one connection group, so you need to specify which one should be the default. Both are equally accessible; one of them just needs to be presented to the user first. You will see the set as default option with other service applications, as applicable.

The interface for manipulating the service application connections in a connection group is the same whether you are modifying the default, [custom], or even a custom connection group created with the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell.

Using the Keyboard to Manage Groups with PowerShell

As with just about everything related to SharePoint 2013 administration, anything you can do in a GUI you can do better with Windows PowerShell cmdlets in the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell.

Depending on which components you have installed, there are more than 100 different cmdlets related to service applications. To discover most of the cmdlets, run the following command from the Management Shell:

Get-Command *serviceapplication*

Have fun with the list that is returned. You will notice that each service application, such as Excel Services, has its own cmdlets, which you can use to provision a new service application without the need to use Central Administration.

Creating a New Service Application Group

After spending all that time learning about service application groups, you were no doubt dismayed to learn that you cannot create reusable groups in Central Administration. As you might guess, you can create your own group using PowerShell.

The cmdlet you need is New-SPServiceApplicationProxyGroup, for which you just need to provide the -name property. The command is as follows:

New-SPServiceApplicationProxyGroup -name YourCustomGroup

Now you have a group called YourCustomGroup. The group is empty, of course, so now you can add a connection to it. To do so, you first need to get the ID of the connection you want to add. To achieve that, run the following cmdlet:

Get-SPServiceApplicationProxy

This will return the DisplayName, TypeName, and Id, which is a GUID. The Id is the important part. Figure 8 shows example output. Keep in mind that your GUIDs will be different.

FIGURE 8

To add the Excel Services connection to the group, you would run the following command:

Add-SPServiceApplicationProxyGroupMember YourCustomGroup -member
F5064277-c045-4984-be7e-215752552596

Remember that you need to enter the GUID for your service application proxy. If you are thinking that was a very long process to merely add a service application connection, you’re right.

An Easier Way to Add Connections

Let’s cheat. Now that you have the new group, you can return to the GUI and do a little clicking to add the other connections to it. Navigate back to Central Administration ⇒ Application Management ⇒ Configure service application associations. Confused? When you get to that page, you will not see YourCustomGroup. You won’t see it on this page until you associate it with a web application. To change a web application’s service application group association, follow these steps:

Now go back to Configure Service Application Associations. You should see YourCustomGroup. Click it. A simple web interface will appear for selecting the service application connections you want to include in the group.

Publishing a Service Application

Now it’s time for some more fun with Windows PowerShell cmdlets. Publishing a service application and consuming it isn’t too terribly difficult and can mostly be done through the UI. The tricky part is setting up the farm trusts and properly securing the Application Discovery and Load Balancer service applications. Once you knock out those two pieces, the rest is a breeze.