Virtualization of a Server with All Three Roles

Many organizations combine the web, application, and search roles on a single virtualized SharePoint server. This is often the case in smaller organizations that want to deploy SharePoint across two guest sessions to be highly available but have a smaller number of guests.

Although combining the three roles results in additional load on an individual server session, many of the same processor and memory guidelines that apply to a dedicated web role server apply to a combined server, as Table 12.1 shows.

The typical virtual web/query/search server role system consists of a VM with four virtual processors and 10GB to 16GB of RAM allocated to it, depending on how many users the system will support. It has a single VHD presized in the 50GB to 100GB range for the guest OS and another VHD for the index and query corpus.

SharePoint administrators familiar with SharePoint 2007 might be dismayed at the memory requirements of SharePoint 2010, but the fact is that SharePoint 2010 requires much more memory than earlier versions. RAM requirements can be lessened, however, by turning off nonessential service applications. In general, to reduce the overall requirements of the SharePoint servers, it is recommended to turn on only those service applications required by the business.