I decided to compose a list of some of my recommendations for running SharePoint on virtual machines. These tips are specifically tailored towards VMware, but most of these apply to MS Virtual Server and Hyper-V as well. Some of these are tips from some hard lessons learned.

1. Don't skimp on resources. Just because the machine is virtualized, it doesn't give you the excuse to use unacceptable memory, CPU, or disk.

2. Use virtual features such as VMware snapshots or make a duplicate copy of the disk files in Virtual Server. These are a great way to roll back a production change. Be sure to make a snapshot of both your Web and SQL Servers. I also recommend shutting down the servers prior to a snapshot. This usually isn't required since VMware can snapshot memory and disk, but its always cleaner if you can turn the machine off especially when dealing with SharePoint.

3. Do NOT use snapshots and disk copies as features to exempt proper testing. I don't care what precautions you take you still need to do proper testing before deploying a production change. Period.

4. Do NOT use snapshots and disk copies as alternatives to proper backups. Usually snapshots and copies of the VHD files still reside on the same physical hard drives. It's a bad idea to use these as replacements for a good backup solution.

5. Use a SAN if possible. Features such as VMotion and QuickMigration come in very handy when needing to give your SharePoint server more resources or perform hardware upgrades to the production environment. These features allow you to easily move the server to another physical host without taking it offline. You can also use SAN replication to protect your entire VMware environment in case of a disaster. SAN replication + VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) = DR simplified.

6. Use VMware Resource Pools to ensure the production SharePoint servers have appropriate resources at all times. Again this can be especially beneficial to the SQL server.

 

That's all for now. I'll update this post when I have more tips to share. If you have some of your own feel free to comment and I'll make sure they are included in a future post.