performance

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Virtualizing Microsoft SharePoint 2010/2013 on vSphere 5 Best Practices

January 26, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 0

Let’s now talk about Microsoft SharePoint 2013. MS SharePoint is one of the most complex Microsoft products. It’s a multi-tier product, that each tier can be scaled individually. Quoting the following from Wikipedia.com, as a summary about Microsoft Sharepoint: “SharePoint can provide intranet portals, document and file management, collaboration, social networks, extranets, websites, enterprise search, and business intelligence. It also has system integration, process integration, and workflow automation capabilities.” MS SharePoint consists mainly of three tiers: Web Interface, Application Server and Database. Each of these tiers needs a defined level of performance, availability and scalability. vSphere 5.x can easily provide the required level of performance, availability and scalability due to its flexibility, its ability to host different types of workloads and […]

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Virtualizing Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) Windows 2012 on vSphere 5 Best Practices

January 22, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 1

Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) is one of the first HA solutions in our IT world and one of the hardest to configure. Although, I don’t have personal experience with MS Failover Clustering, but I know the severe pain of deploying, testing and troubleshooting this solution. Microsoft’s developed this solution so much since its first version. Available versions now are: MS Clustering Service on Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 2012 and 2012 R2. With vSphere 5.x, MSCS can now be virtualized and it’s fully supported by Microsoft. In this part, we’ll talk about MSCS in Windows 2012 and best practices to deploy it in vSphere 5.x environments.These best practices are collected from published VMware best practices guides and Microsoft best practices […]

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Virtualizing Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS)-Windows 2012 on vSphere 5 Best Practices

January 21, 2015 Shady ElMalatawey 0

Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) is the core of our IT Infrastructure nowadays. It’s the authentication and authorization center of any IT Infrastructure. Being here since 1990’s, AD DS has been through a great development till reached this version on Windows 2012 with many new features. Luckily, some of these are only for helping virtualizing Domain Controllers (DC’s) with min. effort and to leverage all of Virtualization advantages and features. These features are: 1-) VM Generation ID (Virtualization Safeguard): An ID that’s generated and add to any Windows 2012 VM when being deployed on a supported hypervisor (vSphere 5.0 U2 and later) .vmx file. It’s used to trace VM life-cycle. When it’s power on for first time, a new […]