As I have written several times I use a virtual environment to develop SharePoint 2007 solutions. Some of the articles are:
Right know I switch between Virtual Server 2005 and Hyper-V. If you are thinking about running SharePoint 2007 in a Hyper-V virtual environment the following articles by Microsoft are a must read:
Hyper-V basics
I have written about the basics at my companies SharePoint blog: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V: Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is the Hypervisor based Virtualization function of Windows Server 2008. As you know Virtualization has a lot of advantages like running more than one server on a physical machine or higher security when separating server functionality. Hyper-V uses the native Virtualization method where the Virtual Machine Manager runs directly on the hardware. This is a huge performance gain compared to hosted Virtualization where the Virtual Machine Manager gets the resources from the operating system.
If Hyper-V is activated the partition with the host operating system (parent partition) is treated like the partitions with the virtual machines (child partitions). Both of them consume resources from the Hypervisor. The Virtualization stack, the process and the wmi provider for managing the virtual machines are located in the parent partition.
Supported Hypervisor technology
SharePoint Products and Technologies supports
Hyper-V prerequisites
Hyper-V is a role that can be turned on if your Windows Server 2008 installation meets the following requirements:
- The OS runs on a machine with a x64-based processor.
- Your machine supports hardware-assisted Virtualization.
- You have hardware data execution protection turned on.
Hyper-V recommendations
The following recommendations are written in the articles Using SharePoint Products and Technologies in a Hyper-V virtual environment and Performance and capacity requirements for Hyper-V. For more details please read the articles. A short summary:
In general
- Use Windows Server 2008 as the guest operating system.
- Install integration components (ICS).
- Install the Hyper-V update for Windows Server 2008 (KB950050) on the host and guests.
- "Do not use the Hyper-V snapshot feature on virtual servers that are connected to a SharePoint Products and Technologies server farm. This is because the timer services and the search applications might become unsynchronized during the snapshot process and once the snapshot is finished, errors or inconsistencies can arise. Detach any server from the farm before taking a snapshot of that server."
Networking
- Use IPv4 as the network protocol for Hyper-V guests and disable IPv6. (Update 18. November: I don't recommend this when running an Exchange Server 2007 on your image)
- Use Private or internal networks. "Private networks and internal networks do not use the physical network card or cable, so communications are faster and network congestion is minimized. You can take advantage of this network performance gain by creating an external network for the Web front-end servers and by creating a private or internal network for the application and SQL Server database servers."
CPU and hard disk
- Use a fixed-size virtual disk for hosting the Index role or SQL Server. You can use a dynamically-sized disk for hosting the Query role or Web Server role.
- "Do not use more virtual CPUs than there are physical CPUs on the Hyper-V host computer. Although Hyper-V will allow you to allocate more virtual CPUs than the number of physical CPUs, this causes performance issues because the hypervisor software has to swap out CPU contexts."
