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Consolidating SharePoint Servers with Hyper-V – Identifying Suitable Candidates

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If you have an existing SharePoint server farm – or any other kind of server farm on a Windows platform – one of the challenges you might face is identifying which servers could be suitable candidates for consolidating into virtual servers.

Luckily, there’s an app for that! Smile Check out the new Microsoft Solution Accelerator: Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) for server consolidation.

You can install it on a Windows 2008R2 server, such as your Hyper-V server, but you should note that it requires the ASP.NET 3.5 server role and and a suitable SQL edition installed (e.g. SQL Express 2005 SP3 or greater should do the trick).

The MAP tool creates an Inventory Database of suitable servers that it discovers on your estate. It collects all this information, but does this without needing to install additional agent software on your servers.

This seems pretty clever, and is achieved using a combination of Windows Remote Management and the Remote Registry service. The only requirements are that you’re local administrator on the servers you want to inventory, and you have WMI and file/print exceptions in your Windows Firewall rules.

The result of the process is a report that shows all physical machines and how suitable they are for virtualisation. It even checks hardware attached to the machines, whether they can support 64 bit OSes, and with Virtual Machine Discovery it also tells you what other virtual machines exist within your estate.

The tool will even export the report as an Excel spreadsheet for you to take away and analyse.

Gordon Ryan from those TechNet chaps has put together another video walking you through the process.

Setting Up a Virtualised SharePoint Platform

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When I’m setting up a SharePoint farm, the first decision I have to make is whether to go physical or virtual. There are many reasons to go virtual:

Consolidation (bringing all your under utilised servers onto one or more physical server),

Flexibility (the ability to create a point-in-time snapshot of a machine and revert to it should something bad happen),

and also perhaps reasons of convenience (you’re mocking up a development or test environment and want to have one-for-one logical mapping between servers you develop against, and those in the eventual production environment).

There are more reasons than this, and the decision tree is vast.

Whether you’re thinking of VMware or Microsoft, or even one of the open source players in the market, here’s a video worth having a look at. This interview shows two differing clients with different needs, making different choices in platform.

But for many development scenarios, and increasingly more production environments, virtualisation makes a great way to build a server farm.

In the good old days of SharePoint 2007, you could make do with Virtual PC or Virtual Server 2005 and 32-bit hardware. Well, these days we don’t have that luxury, as SharePoint requires fully 64-bit hardware, from web front end to database.

For most virtualisation platforms, you’ll also need physical hardware that supports Intel VT / AMD Virtualisation Extensions – which is usually configurable in your machines’ BIOS.

A good platform to consider from Microsoft is either Windows 2008/R2 with the Hyper-V role, or the free Hyper-V 2008 server standalone virtualisation platform. Hyper-V is a role that you can install in Windows 2008 and 2008R2 servers. I’m often asked by developers how you’d go about installing Hyper-V on its own.

In this TechNet video, Gordon Ryan from Microsoft walks you through the steps to install the free Hyper-V 2008 on a server.

For a development machine, you could also consider Windows VHD Native Boot, and here’s link to an overview of Windows Native Boot to VHD at TechNet.