Monday, March 3, 2014

Configuring VMWare Guest VMs to host SharePoint 2013

With the new SharePoint architecture available with SharePoint 2013, while hosting a SharePoint Farm on more than 1 VM is highly recommended, it is not always possible for developers.

Therefore, if you are limited to working with a single VM for hosting the SharePoint application server (presumably you still have a separate domain controller), you should configure your VM minimally with the following hardware configuration:


  1. 2 Processors with 1 Core (preferably 2 Cores)
  2. 8 GB Memory
  3. 80 GB Hard Disk

I actually configured my original SharePoint Guest VM with 1 Processor and 2 Cores thinking that this would make no difference from the above configuration.

However, as I quickly discovered, this slight configuration change makes a tremendous difference!

Even though my CPU was almost perpetually pegged at 100% usage, when I was configured for use of just 1 Processor I would often wait several minutes just to save a workflow I created in SharePoint Designer. Even running a very basic workflow would often take several minutes.



Once I made this CRITICAL hardware configuration change, I was suddenly able to save my workflows in SharePoint Designer in just a matter of seconds and my more complex workflows would run in a minute or less rather than several minutes in its previous configuration!!

No comments:

Post a Comment