Run SharePoint Server on VMware vSphere - The Best Platform for Windows for Uptime and Recoverability

SharePoint provides business-critical services to organizations worldwide. SharePoint deployments are multi-tier and rely on multiple servers and services, and often grow explosively as workgroups learn to harness capabilities for collaboration, workflow, content management and publishing. VMware vSphere facilitates rapid growth, and offers built-in capabilities that ensure high availability and rapid disaster recovery. Once you’ve experienced the benefits that VMware vSphere delivers to SharePoint, you’ll wonder why anybody does it the old way.

A SharePoint infrastructure implemented on VMware virtual machines offers the following advantages over a traditional physical deployment:

• Much more flexibility in design, deployment, and adaptation to growth
• Performance at parity with physical implementations
• Simple, inexpensive high availability options for SQL Server nodes
• Ensure dynamic scalability and rapid provisioning into your private cloud
• Eliminate constraints on scaling SharePoint services as demand grows

Recommended Products

• VMware vSphere

SharePoint Means Managing Growth and Delivering Availability

SharePoint Server can easily create "too much success" for IT – its easy to be a hero for providing tools that increase productivity and change the way people work together, but its very difficult to scale SharePoint resources to maximize their benefit. Its even harder to maintain rock-solid availability and to ensure your ability to mitigate small or large disasters if adding capacity is the biggest problem.

SharePoint Server is a perfect candidate for virtualization. Physical implementations suffer from many limitations including time wasted waiting for servers to arrive, waiting for software to load, and testing complex HA and DR designs. Virtualization eliminates the dependence of the SharePoint component server on physical hardware. Now you can easily add CPU and memory resources on the fly, move workloads to more powerful machines, deal with planned hardware maintenance with zero application downtime, immediately re-start workloads from failed machines, and recover to a DR site without worrying about maintaining exactly duplicated hardware. SharePoint is supposed to work this way. On VMware vSphere, it does!

SharePoint features with VMware vSphere are powerful and unique:

• The thin provisioning feature of vSphere improves TCO through storage efficiency. Search and Content Database of SharePoint provision storage as required and avoid storage over-commit.
• VMware vMotion and VMware DRS provide transparent load balancing across an ESX Cluster. Poorly positioned SharePoint VMs can be load balanced automatically in a SharePoint Farm using DRS and vMotion, with or without administrator acknowledgement.
• VMware HA offers extended VM protection through quick restart on hardware failure. With HA, SharePoint VMs in an ESX server can automatically be moved to another ESX server in case of hardware failure. Availability remains high, the cost and complexity of a cluster is avoided.
• VMware vSphere support for 32 vCPU and 1TB RAM allows you to scale up your Index and SQL server as future growth demands.
• VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch centralizes the virtual switch configuration of your SharePoint Hosts and prevents manual errors in configuring virtual switches per host. Limit the traffic to or from your SharePoint VMs using Traffic Shaping feature. Offload the networking tasks of your SharePoint VMs to your Networking Team by using third party virtual switches like Cisco Nexus 1000V.

Get Advantages Across the Board, Even for SQL Server

SharePoint workloads are proven to scale effectively on VMware virtual machines.

Application consolidation on VMware vSphere helps customers saves significantly on capital costs (servers, software licenses, implementation costs) and operational expenses (power, cooling, admin / server ratios). Both the SharePoint components and SQL Server databases will realize these basic benefits. All components will also benefit from more flexible provisioning for better performance, virtual mobility for improved uptime, and machine independence for rapid service recovery.

The Ideal Application for a Private Cloud

Success in delivering predictable, high-performance IT services at a reasonable cost is heavily dependent on infrastructure and service flexibility in the face of both the short term changes (daily or seasonal load, internal growth) and the long term shifts (budget cycles, program cycles) that drive requirements for an IT organization. It is difficult to predict the future of a SharePoint infrastructure, and it is prohibitively expensive to design a hardware architecture that has a good chance of meeting long-term needs.

Developing a resilient computing service based on the aggregation of physical resources is a proven path to that level of operational flexibility. Beyond the benefits to cost, availability and performance, implementing SharePoint services in a virtual infrastructure will dramatically expand your organization's ability to leverage advanced infrastructure features. Virtualizing SharePoint is an ideal starting point toward an internal compute cloud.

SharePoint is Supported on Virtual Machines

Changes in Microsoft's support policies have made support for SharePoint Server easy for any customer.