SharePoint 2010 and Virtualization

In spite of the ever increasing interest in “the cloud”, the majority of enterprise SharePoint 2010 deployments still involve architecting a set of server-based resources (e.g. CPU, Memory, and Storage) as a target for the deployment of one or more SharePoint 2010 Farms.  These resources are, however, no longer limited to physical servers, but are generally a combination of physical and virtual resources.

Within its just published paper SharePoint 2010 Virtualization Guidance and Recommendations,  Microsoft has provided updated heuristics for SharePoint 2010 virtualization along with specific test results (using Hyper-V)  illustrating various virtualization scenarios.

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Any plan for virtualization must begin with a logical architecting of SharePoint services, web applications, and roles.  Only when the general requirements for the required Farm(s) are understood is an analysis of virtualization possible.   The paper frames its examples within the context of several canonical architectures: small-to-medium Farms, Medium-to-large Farms, and High-Availability Architecture. 

Some of the more important points in the paper:

• Web Front End  is generally the ideal candidate for virtualization, subject to a few qualifications including a preference for hardware over software load balancing
• Query Component is generally a good candidate for virtualization.  In smaller farms, it can be combined with the Web Front End (but should always be separated from the Index server)
• Index Servers, when virtualized, should receive most amount of memory and use physical LUN on a SAN
• In order to improve availability, distribute multiple guest server instances across multiple host servers
• Components with anticipated high and uniform resource requirement should not be virtualized.  In some cases, this includes SQL server while in other cases it could apply to an Index/Crawl server.  In these cases, virtualization could have negative effects on the overall performance of the guest services.

This paper can serve as a good primer to those new to virtualization but contains information useful to those more experienced in virtualization of SharePoint.