André Krijnen

In the last couple of years I installed alot of different farms for SPS2003, MOSS 2007 and yet I started with the installation of MSS 2010.
Most organizations started using Virtualization software like VMWare ESX of other virtualization software. As far as I know I had to most problems with MOSS 2007 on virtual boxes. The most problems where database servers or badly configured boxes.

When you’re using SQL Server or other database server you’ll will see that when they are bad configured your farm is performing very very bad. Why?

One of the biggest reasons is that when you’re running a database direct on a Virtual Hard Drive it will not perform as well. Why? Mostly the vhd’s are using the same LUN on a SAN or physical disk. The best option here is to use pass-through disk to a LUN on a SAN.

Second when you’re running a DB server on a Virtual Box and you allocate shared memory and shared CPU’s it will also cost performance. This is also for MOSS or SP2010. You should use one-on-one CPU. So if you need 4 virtual CPU’s you’ll also need 4 cores and not sockets. For another example check your NUMA(Non Uniform Memory Access).

If you have a virtualbox with 8 cores and 32 GB of memory then your NUMA is 4 GB. So you can maximum allocate 4 GB of memory to a virtual server. If you allocate more memory it can cost your performance.

If your using VLAN’s and you have multiple Virtual Switches ensure that your MOSS or SP2010 environment is using the same Virtual Switch. If the latency is higher then 1ms your performance will drop. MOSS and SP2010 will only have a good performance with a very low latency.

Also if you’re running an AD server and this server is also running poorly your SharePoint environment will also perform poorly. SharePoint authenticates alot.

Most hardware performance issues are written above. Look at it when you’re making SharePoint environment virtualized. 80% of the problems are the DB server of the Indexing Server of your SharePoint environment.