MOSS Virtual Image Download Trial and Virtualization

You may have seen the virtual environment (VHD) that was previously posted on the SharePoint Team blog.  I've gotten some recent questions about the virtual image and trial.

Here are the links to the virtual image.

Virtual PC/Virtual Server MOSS Download Environment

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=67f93dcb-ada8-4db5-a47b-df17e14b2c74&displaylang=en

Online Office System

Virtual 90 minute lab post

MOSS Trial Keys

SharePoint Server Standard Trial: XJMKW-8T7PR-76XT6-RTC8G-VVWCQ
SharePoint Server Enterprise Trial: F2JBW-4PDJC-HKXTJ-YCKRP-T2J9D

Virtual Supportability

I often get asked about VMWare and Virtual Server.  Here's a post that describes the virtualization supportability.  Yes, MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 are supported on Virtual Server R2 and product support does their best with VMWare and the other virtual environments, you may have to reproduce the issue outside the virtual environment if it appears to be related to the virtual environment.  See the post and KBs for more detail.

My thoughts/recommendations on virtualized environments:

CPU, RAM, and Disk IO are real concerns.  Don't skimp on these if you're putting them in a virtual environment.  Our recommendations would remain the same.  I still recommend 4GB as the best base level experience with fast drives and dual or quad core 2+ GHZ CPUs.

Rollback is sweet.  Be very careful with it.  SharePoint Server and WSS are transactional apps, not just file servers.  If you've got SQL (like a cluster or mirrored or log shipped environment) outside the virtual environment (which is a pretty good idea) then you need to be careful what you're rolling back on any given server.  Web Servers we'd often like to think of as completely stateless, but that's not completely true.  That web.config file, the IIS Metabase, and the state of something like a form is important to consider.  NLB often doesn't work well in a virtual environment.  It does often expect to have multiple NICs with DIPs (dedicated IP per interface) and separate VIP (virtual IP address).  If you have multiple NICs, you still need to consider communication, having a separate VLAN or in bound vs. oubound NICs may help you address this complexity in your virtual environment.  SQL clusters on a virtual environment often don't have the benefit of hardware redundancy which is why you need to think through the value of the virtual environment and what it buys you.  Often Disk IO or RAM is the first piece that suffers in a virtual environment, this means not just slower access, it means that crawl speeds will be slower, backup will be slower, and common operations will be slower, all these things result in a less scalable infrastructure, so I do recommend testing and understanding what's in a box.

I'm a big big fan of virtual Dev, Test, and Staging environments (with the exception of perf testing).  Production is the question for me.  I need to look at size, scale, and can still go both ways.  There is no clear decision, it comes down to operations team comfort, budget requirements, rack space, etc...

Every once in a while I hear people asking for a virtualization whitepaper.  What would you like to see?

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