Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]

Because SharePoint encourages rapid growth and “viral” proliferation, user goals may conflict with the ability of the IT staff to deliver the desired services when needed within budgetary and manpower constraints. Flexibility is extremely valuable during this early period. If rapid growth and evolution can be supported at realistic costs, SharePoint can become an important tool to rapidly increase everyday productivity. vSphere facilitates this capability, allowing organizations to leverage the benefits of SharePoint on a pay-as-you-go basis. Because high availability features are inherent to the vSphere platform, these can be leveraged on demand. By virtualizing SharePoint, the common problems of deploying a complex, high-growth IT service are alleviated, allowing resources to be spent on maximizing the value of the tool in routine business practice.

Unlike some applications that have consistent workload patterns on a per user basis (for example, Exchange or SAP), SharePoint workloads can vary greatly depending on how the application is used within the organization. SharePoint services can be deployed in a wide variety of combinations to accommodate very specific application use cases. Even within a specific application use case, usage patterns can vary greatly depending on frequency of user access, time of day, document reads/writes, and document sizes.

Out of the box, vSphere offers several capabilities that enable you to quickly respond to changing usage patterns. Allocation of processor and memory resources to virtual machines can be easily changed to suit the most current business requirements and, in the case of Hot-Add, without any interruption to the operating system or application. You can use vMotion to migrate heavily used SharePoint virtual machines to another host to alleviate physical resource bottlenecks. Finally, template-based provisioning allows the rapid deployment of new SharePoint virtual machines to satisfy increased load.

Here is an updated support statement for running Sharepoint on vSphere.

Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]

Note: Consolidation rates are averages based on “VMware Customer Readiness Reviews.” Licensing savings are cited in the Licensing section of the below whitepaper.

Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]

Performance is a major factor in business-critical applications. Virtual machines perform the same as their physical equivalents, as witnessed in production by the app owners. The following set of graphs illustrates this performance across several applications.

Virtualized Oracle databases perform the same as native databases from the application owner’s perspective (source: Virtualizing Performance-Critical Database Applications in VMware vSphere).

In the figure below, Confio, a third-party company unaffiliated with VMware, compared virtual and physical servers in a side-by-side test, finding the performance would be the same to the DBA (Source: A Comparison of Oracle Performance on Physical and VMware Servers, 2012. Written by Confio, www.confio.com.)

In the figure below, Virtualized SQL databases perform the same as native databases from the application owner’s perspective (Source: Performance and Scalability of Microsoft SQL on vSphere.).

In the figure below, Virtualized SAP performs the same as native equivalents from the application owner’s perspective (Source: Virtualized SAP Performance with VMware vSphere 4.).

In the figure below, Virtualized Java performs the same as native equivalents from the application owner’s perspective (Source: Performance of Enterprise Java Applications on VMware vSphere 4.1 and SpringSource tc Server.).

In the figure below, Virtualized Hadoop performs the same as native equivalents from the application owner’s perspective (Source: Source: “A Benchmarking Case Study of Virtualized Hadoop Performance on VMware vSphere® 5”, 2012.)

Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]

Link: http://vmware.com/go/apps-heart-vmware

Audience: This whitepaper provides solution and technical product information is intended for Architects, Engineers, Administrators, DBAs, App-owners and Business staff

Purpose of this whitepaper: This whitepaper documents the challenges with virtualizing business critical apps and provides evidence for overcoming these challenges and to virtualize these apps.

Executive Summary: Starting with vSphere 4, and more recently using vSphere 5, customers are virtualizing business-critical applications at an accelerated pace. 75-percent of VMware customers report they virtualize at least one business-critical application in their production environment. Application infrastructure administrators and CIOs see that the value of virtualization extends far beyond basic consolidation. Applications run better virtualized, with faster time to market and improved Quality of Service (QoS).

The blog will cover the following applications/functional areas and we will continue to add more over time:

• Microsoft Applications
  • Exchange
  • SQL Server
  • SharePoint
• SAP
• Oracle
• Java Applications 

We intend to use this blog to:

• Communicate best practices for deploying on the vSphere platform.
• Provide Updates on current solution projects and activities including solution rollouts, new collaterals etc.
• Provide Update on various product and solution enablement activities including events, webinars, partner engagements, trainings etc.
• Publish results of lab testing in the aforementioned functional areas.  Testing and results will include functional and technical use cases, workload characterization study and deployment  "how-to".  For official performance test results, please refer to the VROOM! Blog at http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/.
• Communicate general application design principles that we've discovered through research and work with our customers.
• Communicate step-by-step procedures for common application and infrastructure management tasks.
• Highlight VMware and partner products or features than can enhance the overall solution.
• Provide links to relevant online documentation.
• Provide insight on optimizing software licensing costs for virtualization.

We plan on posting regularly so grab the RSS feed or sign up for an e-mail alert to receive notification of new entries as they are posted.

For published whitepapers, including technical whitepapers and customer success stories, please visit our Business Critical Applications website at http://www.vmware.com/solutions/business-critical-apps/.  On the right-hand side, you'll find links to the individual application pages.

Thanks for reading!

Scott Salyer

Solutions Manager, VMware