Virtualizing Your SharePoint Farm Architecture

Damir BersinicSenior Platform AdvisorMicrosoft Canada Inc.damirb@microsoft.com Twitter: @DamirB

OSP310

Agenda

Virtualization ConsiderationsWhich SharePoint Role Should I Virtualize?SharePoint Virtualization ExamplesVirtualization Performance Best PracticesHigh Availability ConsiderationsKey Takeaways

Why virtualize?

Understand why organizations are moving to virtual server infrastructure

Credit crunch –reduce hardware, power consumption and cooling costsReduce environmental impactIncrease server utilizationImproved development and testing life cycle

Why virtualize?

Consolidate / Dedicate servers Reduce number of physical serversMake it easier to provision more dedicated specialty servers (i.e. Separate SharePoint roles onto multiple dedicated virtual servers instead of one ‘all-in-one’ serverDedicated servers tend to have less issues as they run ‘without surprises’ that can be caused by bundling services

Virtualization Software

Use hypervisor-based virtualization softwareUnderstand the difference between physical versus virtual resources

CPUMemoryNetworkDisk

Virtualization Software

Understand the physical and virtual hardware boundaries of your virtualization vendor technology

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Architecture Host: x64

Guest: x86 or x64

CPU x64 CPU with hardware assisted virtualization 4 x virtual CPUS per Guest VM. (Numbers of CPUs is dependant on guest operating system)

Memory Host:  up to 1 TB  Guest:  up to 64 GB RAM per VM

Networking 10GB Ethernet adaptors  12 x network adaptors (8 synthetic ; 4 emulated) per virtual machineunlimited virtual switches and unlimited virtual machines per switch

Disk Direct Attach Storage (DAS): SATA, eSATA, PATA, SAS, SCSI, USB, Firewire Storage Area Networks (SANs): iSCSI, Fiber Channel, SAS Network Attached Storage (NAS) Pass through disk support  (4 x virtual IDE and 4 x virtual SCSI) 512 TB of storage per VM

Licensing Hyper V Server (host free only) ; Windows Standard Server (host + 1 VMs) ;Windows Enterprise Server (host + 4 VMs) Windows Datacenter Server (host + unlimited VMs)

Hyper-V Virtualization Advantages

Better FlexibilityLive Migration. Moves running VMs between compatible physical hosts for performance, hardware maintenance, operating system maintenance, and power optimization without any disruption or perceived loss of service using a memory-to-memory operation using processors from the same manufacturer and family. Hot add and removal of storage. Supports the addition or removal of VHDs or pass-through disks connected to the VMs virtual SCSI controllers while a VM is running. Processor compatibility mode for Live Migration. Enables Live Migration across different CPU versions within the same manufacturer and processor family.

Hyper-V Virtualization Advantages

Greater ScalabilityScalability to 64 logical processors. Hyper-V scales up to 64 logical processors on the physical system and up to four virtual processors for each VM. Server core parking. Places processor cores into a park/sleep mode when not in use. This enables the processor to consume less power without affecting system performance.

Increased PerformanceSecond Level Address Translation (SLAT). The Hyper-V SLAT feature takes advantage of this advanced processor technology to further improve VM performance and to reduce the non productive processing overhead on the hypervisor.Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) support. Enables physical computer network interface cards (NICs) to use direct memory access (DMA) for VM memory, increasing I/O performance.

Dynamic Memory

Hot add and remove of memoryAs a virtual machine needs memory – its needs are evaluated against the needs of other virtual machines in the system, and it is given memory accordingly. DM does not overcommit resourceDM treats memory like how we treat processor

Dynamically schedulable resource

Best Practices

Use x64 host for greater CPU and memory availabilityUse latest operating system for guest OSManagement tools make the differenceUnderstand support and ensure software is certified via Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) Understand licensing (Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter)… Applies to all virtualization software!

Which SharePoint Role Should I Virtualize?

What is a SharePoint Farm?

What is a SharePoint® Farm?A collection of one or more SharePoint Servers and SQL Servers® providing a set of basic SharePoint services bound together by a single configuration database in SQL Server

Key Components:

• Web Front End (WFE) Servers:o WSS / SharePoint Foundationo Web Application Service

• Application Servers:o Search Servero Excel Serviceso PerformancePoint Serviceso Access Serviceso Visio Services

• SQL Server

Role Virtualization Considerations

Role VirtualizationDecision Considerations and Requirements

Web RoleRender Content Ideal • Easily provision additional servers for load balancing and fault tolerance

Query RoleProcess Search Queries Ideal • For large indexes, use fixed sized VHD

• Requires propagated copy of local index

Application RoleExcel Services, etc Ideal • Provision more servers as resource requirements for individual applications

increase

Index RoleCrawl Index Consider • Environments where significant amount of content is not crawled

• Requires enough drive space to store the index corpus

Database Role Consider• Environments with lower resource usage requirements• Implement SQL Server® alias for the farm required

SharePoint Farm – Web Role

Responsible for rendering of content Low amount of disk activityMultiple web role servers are common for redundancy and scalabilityBest Practices

Be sure to keep all components, applications, and patch levels the sameNetwork Load Balancing (NLB)

Hardware -> Offload NLB to dedicated resourcesSoftware -> CPU and Network usage on WFE

For minimum availability split your load balanced virtual web servers over two physical hosts

DISK NETWORK

CPU RAM

SharePoint Farm – Query Role

Process search queriesRequires propagated copy of the index

10%- 30% of total size of documents indexed

Best PracticeLarge Indexes – Prefer dedicated physical LUN on SAN over dynamic expanding virtual hard diskDon’t put your query and index servers on the same underlying physical disk

Combine or split Web/Query role?It depends on your environment.Web and Query performance requirements

DISK NETWORK

CPU RAM

SharePoint Farm – Index Role

Memory, CPU, Disk I/O and network intensiveBest Practices

Give most amount of RAM out of front endsPotentially keep as physical machine in larger environmentsUse Index server to be dedicated crawl server. Avoids hop.Use fixed-size VHDs or physical LUN on iSCSI SAN for best performance

DISK NETWORK

CPU RAM

SharePoint Farm – Other roles

Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services, Access Services, Visio Services, etc. are good candidates for virtualizationAdditional servers can simply be added into the farmNo additional hardware investment required

DISK NETWORK

CPU RAM

SharePoint Farm – Database role

SQL Server 2005/ 2008 virtualization fully supportedMemory, CPU, Disk I/O and network intensiveAssess first using Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (www.microsoft.com/map). SQL Alias flexibilityArgument for Physical:

SQL Server is already a consolidation layerDisk I/O activityPerformance, performance, performance!Longer response times impacts ALL downstream roles in a SharePoint farm

DISK NETWORK

CPU RAM

SharePoint Farm – Database role

If you decide to virtualize database layer:Assign as much RAM and CPU as possibleOffload the Disk I/O from the virtual machines

Use fixed-size VHDs or physical LUN on an iSCSI SAN

SQL Clustering: When virtualizing, consider making use of Guest Clustering in Hyper-VSQL Database Mirroring: Fully supported in SharePoint 2010 in physical or virtual database role environments

DISK NETWORK

CPU RAM

Performance Best Practices

CPU Best Practices

PHYSICALPerformance is governed by processor efficiency, power draw and heat output Faster versus efficient processor – hidden power consumption cost Beware of built in processor software such as performance throttle for thermal thresholds Prefer higher number of processors and multi core Prefer PCI Express to limit bus contention & CPU utilization

VIRTUALConfigure a 1-to-1 mapping of virtual CPU to physical CPU for best performance Be aware of the virtual processor limit for different guest operating systems and plan accordingly Beware of “CPU bound” issues, the ability of processors to process information for virtual devices will determine the maximum throughput of such a virtual device. Example:  Virtual NICS

Memory Best Practices

PHYSICALEnsure there is sufficient memory installed on the physical computer that hosts the Hyper-V virtual machines Factor in Hypervisor memory overhead over and above standard virtual machine memory requirements. Use SLAT-based hardware for lowest memory management overhead

VIRTUALConfigure the correct amount of memory for guests. (memory configuration is hardware specific). NUMA Memory Considerations (see next slide) Watch out for page file / swap file. Disk is always slower than RAM. Ensure enough memory is allocated to each virtual machine. If using VMware, avoid over committing memory as it may cause virtual machine to swap to disk which is slower than RAM. In Hyper-V consider whether or not to use Dynamic Memory

NUMA Memory Limitations

Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) Boundaries exist at the hardware level. Virtual guests that are allocated more memory than exist within a single NUMA memory

boundary have significantly impacted performance

Example: NUMA boundaries vary by processor and motherboard vendor, but good rule of thumb to

calculate boundaries is to divide the amount of memory in the system by the total number of cores.

i.e. Dual Quad-core host (2x4 cores = 8 cores) with 64GB of RAM on the host would mean NUMA boundary is 64/8 or 8GB.

In this example, allocating more than 8GB for a single guest session would result in performance drops.

What NUMA Means to SharePoint

Keeping NUMA boundaries in mind, this means that you will get significantly better performance provisioning two SharePoint front-ends with half the amount of RAM as a single front-end with twice as much RAM.

This applies to any virtualization platform, as the limitation is hardware specific!

Disk Best Practices

PHYSICALEnsure you are using the fastest SAN infrastructure: Attempt to provide each virtual machine with its own IO channel to shared storage using dual or quad ported HBAs and Gigabit Ethernet adapters.Use iSCSI SANs for if considering guest clustering Ensure your disk infrastructure is as fast as it can be. (RAID 10; 15000 RPM) – Slow disk causes CPU contention as Disk I/O takes longer to return data. Put virtual hard disks on different physical disks than the hard disk that the host operating system uses

VIRTUALPrefer SCSI controller to IDE controller. Prefer fixed size to dynamically expanding  (more info here) Prefer direct iSCSI SAN access for disk-bound rolesBeware of underlying disk read write contention between different virtual machines to their virtual hard disks Ensure SAN is configured and optimized for virtual disk storage. Understand that a number of LUNs can be provisioned on the same underlying physical disks

Network Best Practices

PHYSICALUse Gigabit Ethernet adaptors and Gigabit switches Increasing network capacity – Add a number of NICs to host.

VIRTUALEnsure that integration components (“enlightenments”) are installed on the virtual machine Use the Network Adapter instead of the Legacy Network Adapter when configuring networking for a virtual machine Prefer synthetic to emulated drivers as they are more efficient, use a dedicated VMBus to communicate to the Virtual NIC and result in lower CPU and network latency. Use virtual switches and VLAN tagging for security and performance improvement and create and internal network between virtual machines in your SharePoint farm. Associate SharePoint VMs to the same virtual switch.

High-Availability Considerations

Failover Clustering + Hyper-V

To increase the availability of VM’s and the applications they host:Hardware health detectionHost operating system health detectionVirtual machine health detectionApplication/service health detectionAutomatic recovery

VM mobility

Clustering keeps you from putting all your VM eggs in 1 basket

Shared StorageiSCSI

Guest Cluster

Guest Cluster

1 2

Redundant Paths to storage

Shared StorageiSCSI, SAS, Fibre

LiveMigration

1 2

Host cluster

1 2

High Availability & Clustering

Consolidation Increases the importance of High Availability FeaturesConsolidation serves to increase cost for a single system failure Increasing focus on planned outages vs. unplanned outages

Guest Clustering Live Migration & Host Clustering

SQL Server HA/DR & SharePoint

SQL Server High Availability Database Mirroring

Supported in SharePoint 2010Not an option if using FILESTREAM

Clustering (Host or Guest)

Disaster RecoveryEasy to setup virtual DR farm! Data : Log Shipping or SQL Mirroring Use management tools to setup a disaster recovery farm

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008R2

Server deployment best practices

Use SQL Alias for greater flexibilityUse index as your dedicated crawl serverNo query propagation result in fewer disk requirementsNetwork, network, networkDatabase maintenance

Key Takeaways

SharePoint Virtualization Best Practices

Best Practices and Recommendations

CPU •Configure a 1-to-1 mapping of virtual processor to logical processors for best performance •Be aware of “CPU bound” issues

Memory •Ensure enough memory is allocated to each virtual machine

Disk•Be aware of underlying disk read write contention between different virtual machines to their virtual hard disks

•Ensure SAN is configured correctly

Network •Use VLAN tagging for security •Associate SharePoint® virtual machines to the same virtual switch

Others

•Ensure that integration components are installed on the virtual machine •Do not use other host roles (use server core)•Avoid single point of failure: load balance your virtual machines across hosts and cluster virtual machines

Really Important Stuff…

Understand the impact of your virtualization vendor feature set!Don’t let governance slip in your virtualized SharePoint environmentSnapshots are not supportedBeware of over subscribing host serversDo not exceed physical server RAM by more than 15% if using Hyper-V’s dynamic memoryHost is a single point of failure

Even More Important Stuff..

Don’t fight SharePoint, you’ll lose! Virtualization allows you to cut costs, consolidate equipment, and take greatest advantage of hardware resources.Understand your hardware and use the correct processor architecture and operating systemPlan for availabilityContinually measure and optimize configuration to achieve optimal performance of your SharePoint farmConsider Office365 / SharePoint Online

Office 365 / SharePoint Online Features

Based on SharePoint 2010

99.9% Uptime Guarantee

Customizable through rich programming model

Office Web Apps integrated with SharePoint Online

Includes a public-facing site

Session Resources

TechNet: Virtualization for SharePoint Server 2010Download: Planning Guide for Server Farms & Environments for SharePoint Server 2010SharePoint 2007 & Virtualization

Video: Running SharePoint VirtuallyMicrosoft ‘Virtualizing SharePoint Infrastructure’ Whitepaper

Microsoft ‘Virtualizing SQL Server’ WhitepaperSQL Server 2008 Virtualization Web PageBooks:

SharePoint 2007 Unleashed SharePoint 2010 UnleashedWindows Server 2008 R2 Unleashed Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V: Insider’s Guide

Licensing Microsoft Server Products in Virtual EnvironmentsSharePoint 2010 Advanced IT Pro Training

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Related ContentBOF18-ITP Advanced Architectures for Microsoft SharePoint 2010OSP210 | Microsoft SharePoint Online Overview OSP305 | Developing Collaboration Solutions in the Cloud with Microsoft SharePoint Online OSP314 | Architecting Microsoft Office for Physical, Virtual and Cloud DeploymentsVIR201 | Virtualization: State of the Union VIR317 | Understanding How Microsoft Virtualization Compares to VMWareVIR376-INT | Virtualization and Cloud Scenarios: The Technology Serving the Customer’s Goals VIR304 | Failover Clustering and Hyper-V: Planning Your Highly-Available Virtualization Environment VIR321 | Virtualizing Microsoft SharePoint Server with Hyper-V

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