SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

23

Designing Virtualized Deployments

By Brian Wilson

Modern organizations are increasingly using virtualization technologies and strategies to get better value from existing hardware investments.

In purely physical environments, the underlying hardware and infrastructure of your SharePoint environment predominantly does not change after your team has architected, implemented, and configured your SharePoint farm. Virtualization changes everything!

Large organizations tend to have a dedicated virtualization platform team that is responsible for a number of the organization's critical server applications. This team can have a subtle (but profound) impact on the performance of your farm. Their responsibilities involve managing, optimizing, and maintaining the virtualization infrastructure. These responsibilities include tasks such as moving virtual machines (VMs) between physical virtualization servers to increase the density of VMs hosted on the available virtualization servers.

Additionally, competing business solutions and priorities may result in the need to increase the density of the VMs on a single physical host. This has the net effect of increasing the contention for resources between VMs in your SharePoint farm, and VMs running other business solutions.

In the real world, it is not possible for the virtualization team to understand the intricacies, underlying design decisions, and future plans for each VM and virtual topology of machines hosted on physical servers under their ...