Incremental Replication Tab (Office SharePoint Server)

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2008-08-25

The Incremental Replication tab controls incremental replication operations. The incremental replication runs as a Windows Service.

The account running the service must have the Manage user profiles permission on the Shared Services Provider (SSP) of the source and destination server or servers.

The elements of this tab are described as follows.

• Start/Stop
  Starts or stops incremental replication.

  Note

  When a configuration change is made for incremental replication, the Windows Service that controls incremental replication needs to be started or restarted in order for the new configuration to take effect. You should only start or stop the Windows Service by using the Replication Engine user interface, not directly from the Service Management Console.
  When incremental replication is run for the first time, an Account dialog box is displayed. The account requires the SSP administrator permission and local administrator permission (where local is the computer upon which the Replication Engine is running).
  After the credentials (user name or password) of the running service have been configured, any change to these credentials must take place in the Service Management Console. For example, if the password used by the Windows Service expires or changes, incremental replication will fail to authenticate unless you modify the credentials.

• Refresh
  Retrieves the change token of source server.

• Source Server
  Auto-populated by the value of the Source URL field on the Configuration tab.

• Destination Server
  Auto-populated from the Destination URL(s) list on the Configuration tab; the first entry in the Destination URL(s) list is the default. In incremental replication, the Windows Service replicates to all destinations; therefore, you do not have to select a destination server separately. The drop-down list is available so you can view the incremental replication statistics for each destination.

• Source Change Token
  Displays the current change token from the source server.

• Destination Change Token
  Used as a benchmark telling the Windows Service where the replication has reached. The next replication cycle will use this benchmark as a starting point.

• Difference
  Calculates the differences between the change tokens.

• Instrument Incremental Replication
  Indicates that instrumentation files will record the accounts that are successfully replicated. Log files will record the failed accounts and some error messages. A unique error log file will always be created for each instance; log files can be found in the Log folder under the application folder.. For an instrumentation log file to be created, the Instrument Incremental Replication check box must be selected. The incremental replication instrumentation file is also appended with the destination name, creating a file per destination.

Remarks

During the incremental replication operation, a thread is created for each destination. Therefore, replication to each destination is done in parallel and at different speeds, depending on network latency and source and destination farm performance.

When data in a user profile is changed, it is logged by UserProfileChangeWebService. An example of a change is when a user goes to their profile page and edits either the About Me or Skills property.

Example

The following example describes the process of events when incremental replication is initiated.

1. User makes a change to the Assistant profile property.

2. From the database, the change is recorded into the change log.

3. Incremental replication detects the change using UserProfileChangeWebService and the current change token.

4. Incremental replication checks the user’s trusted My Site host locations list to see whether the user profile originates in the source SSP (unless this property is set to Feed on configuration page, which means there no need to check it.)

   Note

   Incremental replication does not check the domain list. It purely depends on the trusted My Site host locations list of source SSP.

   • If Yes, then incremental replication replicates the change to destination farm using UserProfileWebService.

     1. If the change is successfully replicated, then a new change is saved to file and is used to query source again for new changes.

     2. If the change is not successfully replicated, then incremental replication waits x number of seconds and then fully replicates all users (where x is defined in the Wait time between replication failures (seconds) control of the Configuration tab). If no response after x number of seconds, then an event is written to an application log in Event Viewer and is displayed as a critical error with accountName information. This information is detected by Microsoft Operations Manager data.

   • If No, then the incremental replication operation ignores the change.

If the trusted My Site host locations list is not set up and a user makes multiple changes to the same profile property within the same incremental replication cycle, it may cause cyclical replication, running for uncertain iterations before stopping because changes are happening faster than they can be replicated.

See Also

Concepts

Full Replication Tab (Office SharePoint Server)
Configuration Tab (Office SharePoint Server)
Recovery Tab (Office SharePoint Server)