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Executive summary
With the release of Hyper-V, a key feature of Windows® Server 2008, Microsoft® has provided customers with an excellent virtualization tool that can be used for consolidating the number of physical servers required for a full deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. By virtualizing key roles such as Web Front End/Query, and Indexing, customers can now deploy fewer HP ProLiant servers or HP BladeSystem servers to handle all the tasks of many physical servers. This in turn reduces the costs around day-to-day operations (power, cooling, physical management, etc.). HP engineers have spent significant time configuring and testing different Hyper-V configurations with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to determine the viability of the Hyper-V based solutions, and have, as a result of this testing, compiled a list of Hyper-V “best practices” with Office SharePoint Server 2007. This white paper outlines those best practices along with considerations for deploying Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Hyper-V on HP ProLiant servers and HP BladeSystem servers. Additionally, it also contains sample configurations for typical Office SharePoint Server 2007 deployments when using Hyper-V.
Target audience: The target audience for this white paper is groups or individuals who are considering the use of Hyper-V virtualization technology to consolidate the physical server footprint required to deploy Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
The recommendations contained within the white paper are based on testing performed on the RC1 and RTM versions of Hyper-V completed in July 2008 at the HP Solution Alliances Engineering (SAE) lab facilities in Marlborough, MA.
Deploying Hyper-V on HP ProLiant servers
Hyper-V architecture – A basic overview
To understand how to deploy Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Hyper-V, it becomes important to have a basic understanding of how Hyper-V works. Built to utilize the virtualization technology included in the current generation of Intel® Xeon® and AMD Opteron™ processors, Hyper-V is a hypervisor-based virtualization feature included in Microsoft Windows Server 2008. A hypervisor is a thin layer of software that allows for multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on a single host server. The hypervisor software runs directly on top of the hardware platform, with the operating systems running on top of the hypervisor level. A primary virtual machine, or what is called the Parent Partition, runs the virtualization stack, or the software components that support the virtual machines, and has direct access to the hardware. All other virtual machines, called children, do not have direct access to the hardware, but rather have virtualized devices. Devices presented to the child partitions are either considered synthetic or emulated. Synthetic devices package the requests made by the virtual machine devices and transfer them over the VMBus, an in-memory transport pipe, to the physical device. Emulated devices use host software to emulate the device within the virtual machine, which requires additional host processing power. Synthetic devices are designed to have the lowest overhead for virtual devices, and provide a child partition with comparable performance characteristics to dedicated physical devices.
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