Architecting and Managing Virtual- ized SharePoint 2010 Farms (MIT09) – my notes

SharePoint Connections 2010, Den Haag, 29 September 2010

Session: Architecting and Managing Virtual- ized SharePoint 2010 Farms (MIT09)

Speaker: MICHAEL NOEL (http://www.cco.com )

• Dynamically expandable disks a penalize performance so for PROD try to define a disk size
• Recommendations for Database Roles
  • If possible try not to virtualize the database servers
  • Mirroring and clustering are now supported in virtualization (KB 956893)
  • Use best practices for tempDB (put it on fast disk, resize it – there is a guidance on how to configure tempDB for SharePoint)
• Sample specifications presented for various farm types (check slides)
  • Cost effective Farm would be 1 Host with 2 quad core supporting:
    • 1 vm (10Gb, 4 proc) for SQL
    • 1 vm (10GB, 4 proc) for web applications
  • High available Farm with only two servers hosts
  • Best Practice Virtual/Physical with High availability
    • High transaction servers are physical (DB). Multiple farm support with DBs for all farms on the SQL cluster
    • 2 server hosts quad core supporting each
      • 4 vm: 2 vm for web applications for PROD environment, 1 vm for web applications for TEST environment & 1 vm for web applications for DEV environment
      • VMs are load balanced for PROD, TEST and DEV environments
  • Large virtual Farms:
    • 3 server hosts quad core supporting each:
      • 1 vm for DB
      • 1 vm for web applications
      • 1 vm for search server
      • 1 vm for central admin
      • 1 vm for service applications
  • NUMA (non uniform memory access) memory Limitations and Guidelines
    • It exists at the hardware level
    • You can end up with swaps if you allocate more memory to sessions than the NUMA boundary -> instead of increasing performances you end up with decreasing performance
    • Don’t get cheap on memory if you bought a server with many CPU’s
  • Monitoring:
    • Configure Counters and Thresholds on Hosts & on Guests Very interesting slide (check photo)
      • Monitoring processor on guests is useless…you have to measure this on the host
      • Memory…over 50% free is good
  • Support from Microsoft is conditioned by:
    • The hardware used for virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-v)
    • Hardware-enforced Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is available and enabled
    • Deployed on Microsoft Hyper-V (RTM or R2) or on a validated third party hypervisor (SVVP program –> ok for VMware ESX/ESXi)
  • Tooling: System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM 2008 R2)
    •  SCOM 2007 is aware of SharePoint features
    • Quick provisioning: Allows creation of SharePoint template servers which can be quickly provisioned on TEST or DEV environments
  • Licensing:
    • Very important to know that licensing rules related to virtual guest licensing are applicable to all SVVP program vendors: e.g. you can run VMWare ESX/ESXi on a 1 processor host and have only one windows datacenter license for all guests (Windows Datacenter license is per host processor: 4 processors on the hosts = 4 Windows datacenter licenses; it might nevertheless be more interesting to use the Windows Enterprise virtual licensing facilities)

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