Be sure to also read the next part - Numero Drei
We are still not finished with our virtualization tests, but I had to document this early stage of enlightenment (especially since the part one post seems to have been pretty far off the mark). Since virtualization very likely will be a part of my SharePoint experience from now on, I imagine there will be a part 3, 4, etc.
The state of the art of virtualization is a lot better than I thought. One of our IT groups has been building out the infrastructure for VM such that the virtuals will have a much better future than physical machines. Using multiple dual quad core servers with scads of memory, VMWare ESX is pretty amazing stuff.
The purpose of this study is to determine our server needs for a build-out of SharePoint to include new farms in Europe and Asia with up to a terabyte of data in each, and increasing North American capacity to up to two terabytes. There are around 5000 users in 30+ locations (heavily weighted to North America). The current farm is smaller (4 machines in our North America data center and less than 200GB of content). It is currently running on brand new IBM boxes (our SQL cluster is a little bit older). New 64 bit multiple quad core SQL machines will be used (VERY physical - brutes) and all the disk is on SANs.
The way it looks from the early virtualization testing, my SharePoint future is all virtual. 100% virtual. Indexer, WFEs, apps (SQL will have those big, new 64 bit physical machines). For SharePoint servers, tested performance of a VM is comparable (often better) than physical, with so many other advantages that I probably won't want ANY physical servers for the buildout, and I will probably give up the physicals that we already have.
When I started this process I was concerned that the risks of going virtual were high. I am almost convinced that it is the best way to go for high availability and performance. It does not seem to save a lot of money, but it saves some. There may be some hard to quantify costs savings (administration, power, cooling, etc.) and fortunately I will not be under much pressure to put numbers on such things (I'd make them up!).
The final conclusions will come in future posts, but this is encouraging.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
We are currently investigating using Citrix XenServer to virtualize our three Sharepoint 2007 servers (2 front end, one indexing) - we have about 200 active users with about 50gb of data. Relatively small deployment but can you update this post with your impressions now of virtualizing that environment? thanks!
ReplyDeleteAlan Miller
alan.miller@ontera.ca
We left a QA environment up virtual for limited testing. It's Ok for that.
ReplyDeleteBased on our previous tests (see part three), it's not inconceivable to run a production virtual environment. Where I think it would fall down is in a document heavy implementation (lots of big documents loaded into document libraries, and lots of concurrent use). For smaller intranet publishing it may be great. I think it would be important to keep tight limits on things.