About SharePoint 2013 Virtualization and Best Practices

Best Practices

• For the highest level of performance, configure a VP:LP ratio of 1:1 for any virtual machine that is used in a SharePoint 2013 farm. Remember that oversubscribing the CPU on the physical host used for virtualization can reduce performance.
• For optimal performance of demanding workloads, run Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V on SLAT-capable processors/hardware. This offers the additional benefits of improved performance, greater virtual machine density per host machine, and reduced overhead as compared to non-SLAT systems.
• When you are planning how to use the host server’s memory, it is important to consider the virtualization-related overhead. Whether you choose to use NUMA or Dynamic Memory, both have some overhead related to memory management in the virtualized environment. In the case of SharePoint environments, Microsoft does not support the use of Dynamic Memory, or technologies similar to Dynamic Memory found on alternative hypervisor platforms. This is because certain features of SharePoint can suffer from performance degradation when Dynamic Memory is enabled. For example, the cache size for the Search and Distributed Cache features are not resized when the memory allocated to the virtual machine is dynamically adjusted.
• In most production SharePoint Server deployments, we recommend that you have at least 8 GB of RAM on each web server. Capacity should be increased to 16 GB on servers that have greater traffic or deployments with multiple application pools set up for isolation.

In Summary  : I am always sharing following rule with our customers ;

“The Golden Rule for SharePoint 2013 Virtualization” : Configure your virtual machines like a Physical Machine with all dedicated resources ( CPU,RAM,HDD etc.)  for any hypervisor platform and avoid shared Resources.