SharePoint Server 2013 on VMWare

Question

Dear Expert,

My company has a plan to implement 3-tier architecture for SharePoint Server 2013 + SQL Server 2014. We will use all tiers by usibg VMware.

Do you have any concern, if SP2013 runs on VMWARE.

Please suggestion

Answer 1

Yes, I've seen SharePoint 2013 running on VMware many times. Hyper-V is pretty good these days but ESX has a lot of established users. As long as you stick to the hardware/software requirements then you should be supported.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607936(v=office.15).aspx

Answer 2

Hi

Yes, as far as I know SharePoint 2013 along with the SQL Server 2014  can work on VMWare

For more please go through the links below.. 

Server Virtualization Validation Program

Virtualization support and licensing in SharePoint 2013

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Indul Hassan
Microsoft Community Contributor
http://www.indulhassan.com
You Snooze.. You Lose !!

Answer 3

Do you have any concern? Hardware effect, performance effect.

Answer 4

Is SQL Server full supported VMWare?

Answer 5

Hi,

The following are the recommendations from the Microsoft Virtual Academy course (SharePoint 2013 Best Practices).  So, it is not recommended to have SQL server on VM, it should be on standard machine.

You can have WFEs, App Servers and Search Crawl Target Web Server on VMs, rest on standard machines.  Please refer to the following link and table for information on best practices suggested by one of the industry experts.

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/sharepoint-2013-best-practices



Please don't forget to mark it as answered, if your problem resolved or helpful.

Answer 6

Virtualisation is the norm these days for SharePoint installs and very common for SQL.

The only topic that's still considered controversial is that ESX went through a period where it was very poor at CPU allocation when oversubscribed. This has apparently been improved on newer versions of ESX and so is less of an issue but you still hear a lot of ESX guys saying that you can get more performance when assigning two cores than four because of the scheduler.

This might be true, but every time we've tested it (and these weren't scientific tests) they were wrong and performance improved with additional cores. MS actually state that you shouldn't overprovision CPUs anyway for SharePoint virtualisation which is ignored by everyone I know of.

You do see a small but measurable impact to performance with most virtualisation, but that trades off on more efficient use of resources, much easier DR and scalability etc.