Akamai Application PErformance Focus Sheet

Microsoft SharePoint

Do your SharePoint users suffer from poor performance and lack of reliability due to Internet related issues outside the data-center? Trust Akamai to boost worker productivity and your bottom line.
Can Akamais Application Performance Solutions (APS) help you with your SharePoint (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server MOSS) application deployments? Ask yourself the following questions:
you delivering SharePoint applications over the Internet to a geographically dispersed Are user base including Europe and Asia-Pac? Have you invested time, money, and energy into deploying SharePoint only to find that poor performance and unreliable access are slowing adoption, decreasing user productivity, and adversely affecting your business? your business partners, suppliers, or customers have issues collaborating with your Do internal users due to poor performing SharePoint applications? people resorting to phone, email, fax, or other manual processes outside of your Are intended SharePoint due to performance or availability issues? Are large documents shared via SharePoint taking a painfully long time to download? Are you having trouble consolidating data centers for your SharePoint applications? Would you like to reduce your infrastructure costs and consolidate data centers while expanding the global reach of SharePoint to your organization and global partner base?
Want to learn more about Application Performance Solutions? Visit these Akamai webpages: http://www.akamai.com/aps http://www.akamai.com/ html/solutions/web_ application_accelerator.html
Akamai for SharePoint Application Acceleration
Akamais Application Performance Solutions help global businesses accelerate SharePoint applications over the Internet while providing the scalability, reliability and cost benefits associated with a managed service. A research report published by IDC, Determining the Return on Investment of Web Application Acceleration Managed Services, measured the average annual benefit experienced by an organization using Akamais Web Application Accelerator at $42,831 per 100 users. When looking only at the IT cost reduction benefits, the payback period from deploying the service averaged 1.8 months for the surveyed companies, yielding an average return on investment of 582%.

Continued

Microsoft Sharepoint
Akamai Application Performance Focus Sheet
SharePoint Examples with Akamai
The following real examples show how Akamai helps businesses improve the performance and availability of their SharePoint applications over the Internet. All of the test results are based on real business transactions, in contrast to test environments where conditions are simplified to demonstrate artificial gains.
Global Advertising Firm Close to 200% Improvement on 32MB Download
Problem Large file transfers/sharing through global SharePoint application A global advertising firm was experiencing performance issues on their SharePoint application, especially for transactions where large file transfers were involved. A test was performed to measure the difference for large file transfer times. Akamai tested a 32MB file from Bangkok, Seoul, San Jose, Boston and Vienna. As seen on the graph above, Akamai improved the 32MB download by 196%, going from 140.3s without Akamai, to 47.4s with Akamai. Akamai improved download time for the 25MB test file by 121%, from 86.9s to 39.3s. In the Bangkok testing, the 32MB file download time was reduced from 258s to 59s by using Akamai. When removing the 40s lag time that was encountered between the request and the start of the file transfer during this test, the actual file transfer process took just 19s, compared to 218s, representing greater than 10x improvement.
Global Business Services Provider Over 130% Improvement in APAC and over 90% in Europe

Problem Poor global performance and prohibitive data center buildout costs to address the issue A global business services provider uses a SharePoint based portal with consultants, clients and partners, but was experiencing poor global performance in Europe, India, and Asia. They considered building out a data center, but found the cost to be prohibitive, on top of which, the buildout would have been very difficult to manage. Akamai was able to improve page load times in APAC from over 50 seconds, to under 22 seconds, an improvement of 131%. Europe also had an impressive 93% improvement, from over 30 seconds to under 16. The performance improvement proved integral for driving global adoption and resulted in significant cost savings from avoiding data center buildout.
Leading Global Pharmaceutical Firm Average performance lowered by 170% globally and 180% in Japan
Problem Required SharePoint delivery to users in Japan, but concerned with performance impact and potential data center costs to address it This leading pharmaceutical firm uses SharePoint as a portal for medical communities, providing news and information, helpful tools, member forums, and many other valuable reference capabilities. Seeking to bring this capability to the Japan market, they would either have to build a costly data center there to ensure acceptable performance, or alternately, they could use their current data center, along with Akamais managed application acceleration services. The latter provided much greater value. In addition to the savings from not having to build a data center, they also benefited from great performance. In Japan, performance for a 7 step test scenario was lowered by almost 180% from an average 29.9 seconds to 10.7. The peak improvement observed in Japan was 265% during the highest latency period! Globally, Akamai lowered average performance from 24 seconds down to 8.9.
Akamai Application Performance Solutions
Unlike traditional hardware appliance approaches, Akamais Application Performance Solutions extend beyond the datacenter to address middle-mile performance bottlenecks, such as Internet congestion and service provider peering issues. Akamais Application Performance Solutions also improve application availability. Just as the application server must be designed for reliability, it is essential that user requests reach the application server. Akamais fault-tolerant platform and route optimization techniques ensure low latency and high application availability by dynamically steering traffic around problem spots on the Internet. The result is improved end-to-end application performance and high availability for SharePoint applications delivered over the Internet. Akamais Application Performance Solutions (APS) portfolio currently comprises two service offerings that improve the performance, availability, and consistency of SharePoint applications delivered over the Internet: Web Application Accelerator (WAA) - accelerates SharePoint applications to employees, partners and customers over the Internet. Application performance and reliability improvements are achieved through a variety of caching, transport, and route optimization techniques. This managed service is highly scalable with on-demand capacity and does not require any additional IT infrastructure. Access Accelerator (IPA) accelerates SharePoint applications to mobile employees and business partners IP using VPNs. The managed service is complementary with existing IT infrastructure and does not require any clientside software.

Akamai EdgeControl

Akamais EdgeControl Management Portal provides a convenient Web-based interface with advanced configuration and reporting capabilities for customers to customize and monitor their services. For example, application and user intelligence reporting within Web Application Accelerator includes: page views per second, dynamic route optimization, error codes, URL distribution, traffic handling (hits/sec), and an SLA monitoring tool. Enterprises should feel comfortable deploying Akamais Application Performance Solutions to improve the global delivery of their SharePoint applications. Application Performance Solutions are backed by service level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee defined global and performance improvements and network availability.
Example application and user intelligence reports provided to customers within Akamais Edge Control Management Center. These advanced reports are provided free of charge as part of the Web Application Accelerator managed service.

The Akamai Difference

Akamai provides market-leading managed services for powering rich media, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online. Having pioneered the content delivery market one decade ago, Akamais services have been adopted by the worlds most recognized brands across diverse industries. The alternative to centralized Web infrastructure, Akamais global network of tens of thousands of distributed servers provides the scale, reliability, insight and performance for businesses to succeed online. Akamai has transformed the Internet into a more viable place to inform, entertain, interact, and collaborate. To experience The Akamai Difference, visit www.akamai.com.
Akamai Technologies, Inc.
U.S. Headquarters 8 Cambridge Center Cambridge, MA 02142 Tel 617.444.3000 Fax 617.444.3001 U.S. toll-free 877.4AKAMAI (877.425.2624) www.akamai.com International Offices Unterfoehring, Germany Paris, France Milan, Italy London, England Madrid, Spain Stockholm, Sweden Bangalore, India Sydney, Australia Beijing, China Tokyo, Japan Seoul, Korea Singapore
2009 Akamai Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited. Akamai and the Akamai wave logo are registered trademarks. Other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. Akamai believes that the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date; such information is subject to change without notice.

Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies
Published: October, 2008 For the latest information about Microsoft Office, see http://www.microsoft.com/office and for SharePoint, see http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint.

Abstract

Multiple organizations have discovered that SharePoint Products and Technologies provide for significant productivity enhancements, allowing knowledge workers to be more efficient in creating and organizing content. In response, many information technology (IT) departments are being tasked with building and managing scalable SharePoint farms to provide for the infrastructure to support the collaboration and Microsoft Enterprise Content Management support that the technology provides. The SharePoint architect is subsequently tasked with creating a deployment model that is reliable and scalable, but without introducing unnecessary costs or over architecting an environment. The development of virtualization technologies provided with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V has provided SharePoint architects with a flexible toolset that can be used to reduce hardware and energy costs, increase the performance of a SharePoint farm, and provide for design flexibility that would not have been possible with traditional physical deployment approaches. In addition, the introduction of capable tools such as Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008, part of the System Center Server Management Suite, provides SharePoint administrators with the ability to manage multiple virtual hosts, quickly provision SharePoint servers and farms, migrate physical servers to virtual ones, and other key virtualization management enhancements. This paper is written for SharePoint architects who are considering the use of virtualization technologies and management as part of their SharePoint farm design. Topics include Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Virtualization, and VMM 2008. Specific focus is placed on determining which components of a SharePoint farm could be virtualized and examining sample real-world SharePoint virtualization models.

Author Information

Michael Noel is a Partner at Convergent Computing, a Microsoft Gold Partner in the San Francisco Bay Area. Michael is an internationally recognized public speaker on Microsoft technologies and is the author of several industry books from SAMS Publishing including SharePoint 2007 Unleashed, Windows Server 2008 Unleashed, ISA Server 2006 Unleashed, Exchange Server 2007 Unleashed, and Teach Yourself SharePoint 2007 in 10 Minutes.

Contents

Why Virtualize?....1 Benefits of Virtualization in a SharePoint Environment...1 Management of Virtual Environments...2 Overview of SharePoint and Virtualization Components..3 SharePoint Products and Technologies....3 Microsoft Virtualization Core Products...3 Virtualization of SharePoint Components...4 Virtualization of SharePoint Roles...4 Understanding Virtualization Scenarios....8 Additional Virtualization Considerations for SharePoint Farms...9 SharePoint Virtualization Management... 11 System Center Server Management Suites... 11 System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008... 12 Using VMM for Fast Provisioning and Disaster Recovery of SharePoint Servers.. 15 Conclusion..... 16 Additional Information.... 16

Why Virtualize?

Traditional application architecture models focused on defining how many servers would be required to deploy a specific technology. Depending on availability and redundancy requirements, number of users, and other factors, occasionally, multiple servers would be required, even if they were not heavily utilized. This is often the case for SharePoint Products and Technologies as well, as many deployment models provided for multiple redundant Web front-ends, dedicated index and/or application servers, warm stand-by servers, and additional farms for test and development environments. This could quickly lead to a proliferation of SharePoint servers in an organization, many of which would go unutilized or underutilized for long periods of time. Virtualization provides for the ability to consolidate multiple virtual guests within a single physical server, sharing the physical resources across the virtual machines. For SharePoint administrators, virtualization also allows for the flexibility to quickly provision new farm members to handle specific functions or to provide for redundancy of a specific server rolea key design advantage over physical server models.

Benefits of Virtualization in a SharePoint Environment
Reduced hardware costs Virtualization allows organizations to reduce overall physical SharePoint server count. Virtual machine isolation and resource management enable more workloads to coexist on fewer servers, which results in more efficient use of hardware resources and reduces demand overall. This can help save money on hardware, particularly in many organizations where the need for multiple SharePoint farms for production, failover, testing, and development exists. Increased server utilization An Virtualization Efficiencies optimized infrastructure is becoming imperative as servers sprawl and data By some estimates, up to 70 percent of centers reach their capacity for power and space. The problem is aggravated processor and memory deployed on physical for companies whose servers run at hardware goes unutilized. Virtualization allows very low utilization. Server utilization rates for many customers fall into the for a much larger percentage of available 10 to 15 percent range. This is often resources to be more effectively utilized. the case for SharePoint servers in particular, as many farms and servers are provisioned not for performance, but for availability, testing, and redundancy reasons. Reduced facility costs and lessened environmental impact By reducing server count, virtualization solutions also provide the associated benefits of lowering fixed costs including reduced power consumption, reduced cooling costs, and reduced space requirements. In turn, this reduces the overall environmental impact the server farm creates. Improved service levels from IT organizations Virtualization solutions enable organizations to rapidly deploy new servers and operating environments. Many of the problems associated with the traditional marriage of one server to one operating system are eliminated with
virtualization, which allows IT staff to quickly deploy multiple operating systems and applications to fewer servers. It also allows them to delegate server provisioning to designated non-IT users for specific tasks. IT staff can then focus on higher-value, strategic activities rather than procuring, racking, and stacking hardware. Extend useful life of legacy systems Virtualization technology can be used to consolidate multiple physical servers onto a single server. Virtualization can also be used to re-host legacy SharePoint physical farms, especially as older generation hardware becomes more difficult and costly to maintain.

Management of Virtual Environments
Streamlined manageability and security Virtualization enables IT organizations to enhance their administrative productivity and rapidly deploy new servers to address changing business needs. Easy integration into existing server management tools, such as those in the System Center suite of products, facilitates integrated management of Windows-based virtual machines. The ability to consolidate workloads in a hardware agnostic environment and an integrated physical and virtual IT management framework enables administrators to lower operational costs and create more agile infrastructures. Improved manageability features include reducing downtime entailed in operating system and application patching in that virtual machines can be tested, updated offline, and then copied when ready. Improved security features include the ability to isolate and sandbox a suspect environment using virtualization technologies. Improved development, testing, staging, and production software development lifecycle It is easier to replicate/simulate a virtual production environment over a physical production environment. It is also less expensive to provide a virtual development through staging environments than to provide physical environments for P2V and V2V with VMM each of these environments. In The Physical to Virtual (P2V) and Virtual to addition, a virtualized SharePoint farm allows developers to use Virtual (V2V) capabilities of System Center VMM consistent and well-maintained allow for administrators to make exact copies of developer images. Dynamic Data Center Batch jobs using Microsoft Windows Powershell and scripting and scheduling the server to continue to run while the virtual technologies can easily start or stop copy is created. workloads. It is simple to pause activities on a server, transfer server files, and then resume work on another server using the virtualization product features. This allows organizations to quickly scale up a SharePoint farm by dynamically assigning additional front-ends to the workload and removing them when they are no longer required. the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to allow running servers. They do this by integrating with

balanced pool. This provides for both high availability in the event of a failure of an individual server, but also provides for distribution of the load across the Web front-ends. Virtualization adds another layer to this as SharePoint architects are no longer limited to individual physical boxes, but can instead be distributed across multiple virtual guests. In the event that the load increases in a SharePoint farm, additional Web role servers can be quickly provisioned to distribute the load. For example, where previous physical architecture would dictate two or more physical servers with a large amount of memory and processor capabilities, current flexibility with virtualization technologies allows for a larger number of virtual servers that use less memory and processor than their physical counterparts. Indeed, recent testing performed by Microsoft found that throughput on virtual Web roles with 8GB of RAM allocated to them performed only 7.2 percent less than a physical Web role server with 32GB of RAM allocated to it. In the same testing, page response time was only 4.4 percent slower on the Hyper-V Web front-end than the physical server. This type of testing illustrates how virtualizing the Web role has little impact on overall performance compared to physical Web role servers. Virtualization of the SharePoint Query Role The query role, responsible for searches performed by users, is another possible candidate for virtualization, as long as SharePoint architects consider a few key factors. First and foremost, each query server in a farm must have a propagated copy of the index stored on a local drive. Depending on the amount of data that is being indexed, both within and outside SharePoint, the index size can be quite large. The index corpus can vary in size from 10 to 30 percent of the total size of the documents Query Propagation being indexed, so SharePoint architects will need to take this into account when If the query role resides on the same designing a virtual server solution. For large server as the index role, there cannot be indexes, it is generally recommended that each index server use a physical disk volume any additional query servers in the farm, that is dedicated to the individual query as SharePoint will not propagate the server, rather than a virtual disk (VHD) file. Hyper-V fully supports this scenario, and it index. For virtualized environments, this provides for faster disk performance than a can mean fewer disk requirements for VHD file. SharePoint architects often combine the Web and the query role onto the same servers, and this model is also supported in a virtualization environment, as long as the propagated index considerations listed previously are taken into account. Because of the ease of provisioning new servers, and the ability to deploy multiple servers on a small number of physical hosts, many SharePoint architects find it advantageous to break the query role from the Web role and virtualize them as separate sessions. For example, a pair of Web/query servers in a physical farm could instead become four separate serverstwo Web and two query. The key is that Hyper-V provides for this type of flexibility, and if the query role performance suffers in the future, the SharePoint architect can always break the role onto a separate server in the future, if needed. the index corpus.

Virtualization of the SharePoint Index Role The index server role in a SharePoint farm is often the most memory-intensive role, making it a less ideal candidate for virtualization. This by no means rules it out as a candidate to be virtualized. It simply reduces the advantages that can be gained by virtualizing the server, as more of the hosts resources will need to be Crawling Recommendation dedicated to the task. As with the query role, the index role requires enough drive space to store the index corpus. Depending on the size of documents being indexed, this could be a volume of significant size. If large enough and for performance reasons, it is often best to attach directly to a physical volume connected to the host server, rather than to a VHD virtual disk file. It can be advantageous to have the index server be the dedicated crawl server for a farm, as it eliminates the extra hop required to crawl content in a traditional scenario when other Web servers are used. To do this, the Web role must be added to
the server, and the farm must be If the environment is small, if it is a test or configured to use a dedicated server. development environment, or if it does not crawl significant amounts of content, it is perfectly viable to use virtual disk files for the index role. For very large production SharePoint farms or for farms that are crawling a significant amount of content, the memory requirements and disk I/O activity may prompt SharePoint architects to install the index role on a physical server. SharePoint architects can start an environment with a physical server and then virtualize at a later time using Physical to Virtual (P2V) tools that are part of VMM. (See the section System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.) Virtualization of Application Roles The application roles of Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services are sometimes installed on dedicated servers, depending on their usage. These roles are similar to the Web SQL Alias Flexibility server role in that they also can be easily virtualized in many environments. As the When provisioning a new SharePoint farm, resource requirements of the individual it is highly recommended to use an alias to application increase, additional servers to assist with the application can simply be connect to the Microsoft SQL Server , as added to the farm. Indeed, the flexibility this provides for greater flexibility to move of the virtualization model makes it easier for SharePoint architects to simply break the SharePoint databases to a new server. out the application roles onto their own For example, if starting with a smaller, dedicated servers without having to invest in additional hardware. virtual SQL database server and then scaling out to a larger physical cluster in the future, the migration process can be simplified by using an alias during the installation. Virtualization of the SharePoint Database Role The least common role that is virtualized in production scenarios is the SharePoint database role, mainly because this role

has the highest amount of disk I/O activity and can often have very high memory and processor requirements. This rule of thumb generally only applies to production SQL databases, however, and it is very common to see the SQL Server virtualized in test farms, quality assurance (QA) farms, demilitarized zone (DMZ) farms, or smaller SharePoint environments. The litmus test for whether to virtualize SQL Servers is whether a high level of usage is expected from the server itself. Gathering performance metrics using a tool such as System Center Operations Manager 2007 can be a useful way to determine the disk I/O requirements of an existing farm if determining whether or not to virtualize that environment. Common deployment scenarios for the SQL role in a SharePoint farm may have multiple farms, both physical and virtual, use a single database server or database cluster, further increasing the amount of resources consumed by the role. For example, in Figure 1, the sample SharePoint environment illustrated maintains a two-server SQL cluster that is used by several virtual farms and one production farm.
Figure 1: Sample Multi-Farm Physical and Virtual SharePoint Architecture
In Figure 1, the organization chose to virtualize three front-ends as part of their production farm, but to maintain a dedicated physical index server. They then chose to virtualize the rest of the farms, including QA and two Development farms, and to host all of the databases from each of the farms on a physical set of SQL Servers. Virtualization of the SQL database role, whether using SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008, is fully supported for a SharePoint farm. With this in mind, a SharePoint architect can examine whether it makes sense to virtualize a SQL environment for SharePoint or whether it is more
Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies 7
logical to choose the more traditional physical server model for the SQL farm that a production SharePoint environment will use.
Understanding Virtualization Scenarios
There are many common scenarios where SharePoint infrastructure can be effectively virtualized on Hyper-V hosts. In addition to production scenarios, where the SharePoint architect is looking to take advantage of the consolidation and performance improvements that Hyper-V offers, there are several additional scenarios that virtualization provides key benefits. Virtualization of SharePoint Farms for QA and Test Environments One of the most common and widely used virtualization models for SharePoint is one where smaller test and development farms are virtualized. Since the resource Multiple SharePoint Farms requirements for these types of farms are typically quite low, quick Many SharePoint environments are installed and easy virtualization and not just on a single farm, but on multiple provisioning of new farms is facilitated through the use of farms. Farms for QA, Test, and Dev are one Hyper-V technologies. In these reason, but other reasons may include security environments, typically all of the server roles, including the SQL isolation, content in different locations across a database role can be virtualized, as Wide Area Network, or for Disaster Recovery. disk I/O and memory requirements are quite low. Virtualization of many of these environments can greatly decrease the overhead required In certain cases, some organizations build test environments that exactly with running multiple farms. match the specifications of the production environment. For these environments, it may be the case that not all of the components are virtualized, depending on whether they are in production. In many cases, however, an approximate virtual sample infrastructure is created to roughly equate to what is currently in production. Virtualization of SharePoint Farms for System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 Recovery Farms DPM 2007 is an enterprise-level backup and restore platform for SharePoint environments, providing for snapshot-based recovery of SharePoint farms and individual item-level recovery capabilities. When using DPM 2007, the supported approach to recovering individual items from SharePoint backups is to build a Recovery Farm that is used for restoration of the content database from which the item will be extracted. The most straightforward approach to construction of a Recovery Farm with DPM 2007 is by virtualizing the farm components. In most cases, this means installing all roles on a single virtual server that has the available local disk capacity to store the largest content database that exists in production. This farm is then only used for recovery of SharePoint content using the DPM console, and can be paused or turned off when not in use.

Virtualization of SharePoint Farms for Disaster Recovery Testing A task that is often overlooked in many SharePoint environments is the task of testing disaster recovery failover of the SharePoint farm. Many organizations have plans in place, but the actual procedures have never been tested with production data. Using virtualized equipment, SharePoint administrators have the flexibility to test their disaster recovery scenarios in a realistic environment with real data. A copy of existing SharePoint production and failover farms can be created using the P2V tools and V2V tools included in VMM. (See the section System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.) These tools allow for running servers to be copied to isolated virtual networks where the disaster recovery process itself can be fully verified. This same process is also used when creating refreshes and copies of existing SharePoint farms for test environments.
Additional Virtualization Considerations for SharePoint Farms
Hardware Requirements for Virtualization Infrastructure The general rule of thumb for virtualization is that the more memory and processor power that can be allocated to a host, the better. Having more memory and processing power will increase the number of virtual sessions that are allowed, and will allow for expansion of the environment as necessary. In addition, adding additional memory or processor capabilities will have a similar effect. Server Licensing for Virtualization Microsoft provides for a flexible licensing model for Windows Server when running in a virtualized environment. Each version of Windows allows for the following virtual licensing allowances: Windows Server Standard Edition One license of Windows Server Standard Edition covers one instance of the server software in the physical operating system environment (POSE) and one instance of the server software in a virtual operating system environment (VOSE). Windows Server Enterprise Edition One license of Windows Server Enterprise Edition covers the host server plus an additional four server licenses (either Standard or Enterprise) that run on the Enterprise Edition host. Windows Server Datacenter Edition One license of Windows Server Datacenter Edition covers the host server plus an unlimited number of virtual server session licenses that run on the host.
This licensing model covers both Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 hosts and guests, and applies to either 32-bit or 64-bit editions. NUMA Memory Considerations Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) nodes are memory boundaries on the physical hosts that virtual sessions can be split across if those sessions are allocated a large amount of RAM. In general, the more NUMA nodes a virtual guest is spread across, the fewer gains in performance will be realized. In some testing, a virtual SharePoint Web server role with an

SharePoint Virtualization Management
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is an excellent tool for virtualization of servers, and many organizations are deploying multiple Hyper-V hosts for virtualization of SharePoint and other servers. With the proliferation of hosts and guests comes increased management and administration that is required to keep the environment functioning properly. In addition, many organizations are looking for comprehensive tools to allow for migration of physical and virtual servers to Hyper-V. To address these needs, Microsoft has developed a comprehensive virtual machine management tool called VMM, part of the System Center suite of management tools.
System Center Server Management Suites
The System Center suite of management tools includes several other components that allow for management of SharePoint and other virtualized and non-virtualized servers. These products allow for comprehensive control of multiple servers, both virtualized and nonvirtualized. The most obvious candidate for virtualization management in the System Center line is the VMM 2008 product (see the section System Center Virtual Machine Manager System Center Suite 2008), but there are other products within the Licensing System Center suite of tools that allow for inServer Management Suite Enterprise depth control and management of virtualized SharePoint servers. (SMSE) is a cost-effective method of System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007 is a comprehensive backup and restore platform specifically designed for SharePoint environments. It provides for snapshot-based backup of SharePoint farm content by using the VSS installed on the Windows Server Operating System. DPM provides for quick and frequent backups of the entire SharePoint farm, itemlevel recovery capabilities, fast backup and recovery from disk capabilities, and granular retention policies for SharePoint administrators. System Center Operations Manager 2007 acquiring the Enterprise management licenses for the four System Center productsDPM, OpsMgr, ConfigMgr, and VMMand the rights to use VMM 2008 server software. The SMSE is licensed on a per physical server basis with unlimited operating system environments (OSEs). VMM 2008 is also available in a stand-alone version.
System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2007 is an advanced management tool that allows for proactive monitoring of a server environment. For SharePoint farms, OpsMgr monitoring has significant capabilities, as custom built SharePointspecific knowledge has been built into freely downloadable management packs, which are installed directly into the tool and provide SharePointspecific knowledge to be added into the platform. For example, the application-specific knowledge built into the SharePoint Management Packs for OpsMgr allows SharePoint administrators to be alerted when events that affect a SharePoint farm are triggered. Integration of OpsMgr 2007 into a SharePoint environment greatly improves the ability of SharePoint administrators to monitor and maintain SharePoint servers.

System Center Configuration Manager 2007 System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) 2007 is a comprehensive tool that allows SharePoint administrators to track hardware and software assets, monitor the configuration of servers, patch SharePoint systems, and deploy operating systems more efficiently. The Desired Configuration Management component of ConfigMgr can be especially useful for SharePoint farms with multiple Web front-ends, as it provides a mechanism to track changes made to servers, allowing administrators to ensure that each system is configured identically.
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 provides a straightforward and costeffective solution for unified management of physical and virtual machines, consolidation of underutilized physical servers, and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines. It Management of Hyper-V and provides for critical virtual management functionality in environments that are VMware Hosts considering virtualizing SharePoint farms, VMM is an end-to-end management particularly when dealing with multiple solution that can manage both Hyper-V servers and farms. guests and VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3). It integrates with VMwares VirtualCenter server to directly manage the VMware hosts. This allows for VMM to perform tasks specific to VMware, such as moving sessions from ESX hosts using VMotion technologies. VMM 2008 is the ideal management tool for SharePoint administrators tasked with the upkeep of virtualized SharePoint farms, as it provides valuable tools that allow for rapid provisioning of new SharePoint frontend servers, conversion of physical servers to Hyper-V guests, and other highly useful management capabilities.
Fast and Reliable Physical-to-VirtualMachine Conversion Converting a physical SharePoint server to a virtual machine can be slow and error-prone. VMM improves the Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) experience by integrating the conversion process and by using the VSS for Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 to create the virtual machine faster and without having to interrupt the source physical server or shut it down. Fast and Reliable Virtual-to-Virtual-Machine Conversion To help ease the migration from VMware virtual guests to Hyper-V, VMM converts VMware Virtual Machine Disk Format/Virtual Machine Extensions (VMDK/VMX) virtual machines to the Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format. If the guest operating system runs Windows, VMM will perform fixes during the conversion process, to ensure a working converted virtual machine. Easy Identification of Consolidation Candidates VMM allows for migration of an existing SharePoint physical environment to a virtual environment by allowing architects to identify which servers are the ideal candidates for virtualization. VMM allows for this level of control by identifying the appropriate physical workloads for consolidation onto virtual machines. VMM leverages historical performance

Familiar Interface, Common Foundation The VMM Administrator Console is built on the familiar Operations Manager 2007 user interface, already widely in use and recognizable within many organizations. The VMM library is also based on standard Windows file shares, which increases its ease of adoption. In addition, comprehensive health monitoring of hosts, virtual machines, library servers, and VMM components is provided through the Virtualization Management Pack in Operations Manager 2007. Below the surface, System Center also is integrated with familiar tools and technologies. For example, System Center uses a SQL Server database to store performance and configuration data, and reporting in VMM leverages the familiar SQL Reporting Services provided through Operations Manager. Fully Scriptable Using Windows PowerShell VMM is built on Windows PowerShell, a widely used administrator-focused command shell and scripting language. Easy to adopt, learn and use, Windows PowerShells architecture enables the quick construction of ad-hoc integration solutions. Its scripting features allow administrators to integrate System Center with established tools and procedures in the data center.
Using VMM for Fast Provisioning and Disaster Recovery of SharePoint Servers
There are many scenarios when quick provisioning of SharePoint servers is ideal, as it gives SharePoint architects and administrators flexibility to rapidly create farms for disaster recovery, testing, or development work. Management of virtual SharePoint servers using VMM allows for this type of rapid provisioning of pre-configured servers, which has significant operational advantages over traditional server build models. With the creation of a SharePoint server template in VMM, new servers can be quickly added to existing farms or new farms can be created on the fly. This covers scenarios such as the following: Adding Capacity to an Existing Farm VMM can quickly provision additional Web front ends to an environment to handle increased load, such as in scenarios when a seasonal business ramps up traffic during certain months of the year. When the additional SharePoint Web servers are no longer needed, they can be quickly removed from the farm. Creating a Disaster Recovery Farm VMM can be used to quickly create a disaster recovery farm for a SharePoint environment. This can be performed during a disaster or to prepare a warm standby farm for restore of SharePoint production data. Provisioning QA or Test Farms Multiple QA or test farms can be quickly provisioned, and data in those environments can be more easily refreshed using VMM. Testing Failover VMM can be used to convert V2V or P2V production farms to a test environment, where disaster recovery and failover procedures can be tested against production data without affecting production servers.

Conclusion

Virtualization and virtualization management are powerful tools for SharePoint farm architects, as they allow for greater flexibility in deployment and server role placement. The ability to quickly provision virtualized SharePoint servers and farms provides new capabilities and improves disaster recovery methods. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is an ideal environment for SharePoint server virtualization, as its Hypervisor architecture provides the guest sessions direct access to the hardware of the host server, greatly improving performance. In addition, support for 64-bit guests allows for greater performance and architectural flexibility. While specific SharePoint roles such as the SQL Database role may not be the ideal candidate for virtualization in all scenarios, SharePoint Products and Technologies are fully supported in a Hyper-V virtualization environment. Additionally, significant improvements in resource utilization, disaster recovery, and multiple farm deployment capabilities are made possible with virtualization. With the proliferation of virtual server hosts and guests, management of the deployed infrastructure becomes a top priority. Microsofts System Center Management Suite, including VMM 2008 provides a highly capable set of tools to manage virtual environments, allowing for P2V and V2V conversion, rapid provisioning from server templates, and Performance and Resource Optimization capabilities. All of these capabilities within the System Center Suite are rapidly positioning it as an ideal tool to provide SharePoint architects and administrators with critical management functionality in a virtualized SharePoint infrastructure.

Additional Information

Product Marketing http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint Community Portal http://mysharepointcommunity.com Hyper-V Planning Guide http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb897505.aspx Microsoft Virtualization http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/default.mspx Windows Server 2008 Editions http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/editions-overview.aspx Hyper-V http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/servermanager/virtualization.mspx System Center Server Management Suite http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/management-suites.aspx

System Center Virtual Machine Manager http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/virtualmachinemanager/en/us/default.aspx
The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. This white paper is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property. 2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Excel, Hyper-V, InfoPath, the Office logo, SharePoint, SQL Server, Windows, and Windows Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.