According to Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), in a survey of 1,191 IT and business managers, 33% of North American and Western European mid-market and enterprise companies are currently using SharePoint technologies. With the widespread usage of SharePoint, more and more companies are looking into virtualizing their SharePoint 2007 environment. I have been recommending SharePoint virtualization to my clients for quite some time and run our own SharePoint servers in Hyper-V.<\/p>\n
Virtualization offers several benefits. Here’s a partial list of benefits.<\/p>\n
– Reduction in overall size of your infrastructure<\/p>\n
– Cost savings in power usage<\/p>\n
– Ease of management<\/p>\n
– High availability and better disaster recovery<\/p>\n
– Reduction in server space requirements<\/p>\n
– Fully supported by Microsoft on Virtual Server 2005 and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V<\/p>\n
According to the findings posted in this article<\/a>:<\/p>\n In terms of performance, (omitting the SQL backend – which has been virtualized in other tests showing EXCELLENT performance), across 3 baseline tests, on average:<\/p>\n – Our Virtualized SharePoint server infrastructure farm out-performed the physical SharePoint farm by 4%, If you are looking for comprehensive information on virtualizing SharePoint, check out the Virtualizing SharePoint Series<\/a> on MSDN from Microsoft Consulting Services.<\/p>\n Should You Virtualize Your SQL Servers?<\/strong><\/p>\n I am no expert on SQL Server but I do know that a lot of people report performance gains by virtualizing their SQL Servers. Brent Ozar, a SQL expert, answers the question about virtualizing SQL Server in his blog. He says that:<\/p>\n – Virtualize only when it\u2019s going to solve a problem, and you don\u2019t have a better solution for that problem. He has two excellent blog posts, one on why you should and the other why you shouldn\u2019t virtualize SQL Server.
\n– But only used 26% of the electrical power (watts) required to power the physical server infrastructure – put another way, that\u2019s a 74% power saving over physical, put yet another way, going physical means 380% more power.
\n– 1017 Watts versus 3952 Watts. 6 Power cords versus 22<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n– Get good at performance monitoring before you virtualize, because it\u2019s much tougher afterwords.
\n– Start by virtualizing the oldest, slowest boxes with local storage because they\u2019ll likely see a performance gain instead of a penalty.
\n– Avoid virtualizing servers that have (and utilize) more than 2 HBAs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nWhy Would You Virtualize SQL Server?<\/a>
\nWhy You Shouldn\u2019t Virtualize SQL Server<\/a><\/p>\n