+1
If you have the luxury of massive IOPS then you'd just virtualize the SQL cluster as well. Virtualisation has come a very long way, especially now we have the ability to run 64bit guests. If you do have fast disk, the benefits of virtualisation massively outweigh physical machines (read: DR/snapshotting/etc). M From: ozmoss-boun...@ozmoss.com [mailto:ozmoss-boun...@ozmoss.com] On Behalf Of Nigel Witherdin Sent: Friday, 24 February 2012 2:54 PM To: OzMoss Subject: RE: Virtualization preferences for a new SharePoint Farm Hi, I prefer VmWare, simply because I am more comfortable with it - most places I have worked at use ESX as their virtualization solution. I think it is still recommended that your SQL cluster is physical, though it works ok when virtualised as well (my current employer has SQL 2008 R2 virtualised), but the performance of the whole thing then depends a lot on having good IOPS from the drive carrying the virtual machines. SharePoint 2010 requires the following IOPS: * Crawl database, search requires from 3,500 to 7,000 I/O per second * Property database, search requires 2,000 IOPS. Although I dont think they cover off on virtualised database servers, I found this document quite useful for this sort of stuff: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/services/dell_large_sharepoint_farm.pdf Cheers, Nigel _____ Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:12:31 +1100 Subject: RE: Virtualization preferences for a new SharePoint Farm From: tand...@tassoc.com.au To: ozmoss@ozmoss.com Hi All, I should preface my questions by saying that I am *not* an infrastructure specialist, but a SharePoint Architect and Conslultant, and am in the process of specifying the infrastructure for a new SharePoint 2010 production farm within the organisation I work, and the question of any virtualization preferences for the farm have arisen in two senses: 1. We are free to choose either VMWare ESX Server Technology, or Microsoft HyperV. I'd appreciate any feedback positive or negative on either platform. I have personally had a recent bad experience in the VMWare world with the VMWare "Ballooning" memory management causing a SharePoint installation to run very poorly, but I assume that was simply inadvisable resource allocation by those managing the environment. However any advice one way or the other about the preferred virtualization platform would be much appreciated. 2. My recollection from several years ago, is that it would generally have been considered wise to recommend that the SQL Server cluster supporting such a SharePoint Farm remain on physical servers. What are others doing these days? Are you tending to virtualise your SQL Server Server clusters supporting SharePoint, or also virtualizing these as well? This cluster will be a new SQL Server 2008 R2 cluster, as the other SQL Server instances / clusters within the organisation are not of an appropriate version or architecture to support SharePoint 2010. Any feedback on these issues would be much appreciated. Cheers, Trevor Andrew _______________________________________________ ozmoss mailing list ozmoss@ozmoss.com http://prdlxvm0001.codify.net/mailman/listinfo/ozmoss
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