Virtual Server Issues and Recommendations for MOSS Virtual Environments

One of the tasks that I completed this week was splitting our Development environment (DEV) into multiple VMs -- one SQL Server VM, one Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 VM for the SSP, and another MOSS 2007 VM for the front-end Web server. Up to this point, DEV was comprised of two VMs: a domain controller and another single-server MOSS configuration (combined SQL Server and MOSS SSP/Web).

[As a side note -- I am not sure if I've mentioned this in a previous post or not -- I recommend that you always use a separate VM for the domain controller. I can't tell you how many times I've seen bugs that only surface when running on a DC. You're not going to use that configuration in PROD, so why use it in DEV? You can "clamp down" the VM running Active Directory to 96 MB if memory is really tight on your Virtual Server host (e.g. your laptop). I ran that configuration for a couple of years and performance is quite acceptable. About a year ago I increased the memory on the domain controller to 256MB since I also run SMTP and POP3 services on the DC so I can have basic e-mail functionality (this is my one and only exception to isolating the domain controller).]

To be honest, until this week I had not been using DEV all that much since I do all of my development on a different VM -- a single-server MOSS configuration that I run on one of my servers in the Jameson Data Center (a.k.a. my basement). I simply check in my code to source control after developing and testing it locally.

However, during our feature walkthroughs this week, the entire team experienced firsthand how bad the performance was in DEV. The CPU was pegged nearly all of the time. Apparently the dual core CPU in my home server -- that I built last year with $1,000 worth of components from Newegg.com -- is quite a bit faster than the 8-CPU server we use to run DEV. Since each VM can only use a single CPU, we all sat idly by waiting for the VM to respond to my mouse clicks. [By the way, the walkthrough wasn't the first hint that performance was really bad in DEV. I noticed that the last deployment to DEV required almost 3-1/2 hours to complete, whereas the same process typically takes a little over an hour on my local VM (deployment involves creating a couple of Web applications, creating and configuring an SSP, and building out roughly 180 site collections).]

In order to leverage the 8 processors on the DEV server, we needed to create separate VMs for SQL, MOSS Web, and MOSS SSP. We'll probably bottleneck on disk I/O after this change (due to the fact that the DEV server only has one drive we can use for VMs) but perf will certainly be better than it was before.

During the process of building out the new VMs, I encountered a couple of problems related to Virtual Server. In order to install SQL Server and MOSS 2007 on the new VMs, I downloaded the ISO images from MSDN to the Virtual Server host. However, when I attached the SQL Server ISO image to the new VM, I encountered the following error:

setup.exe - Bad Image

The application or DLL D:\SQL Server x86\Servers\Setup\setupex.dll is not a valid Windows image. Please check this against your installation disk.

Assuming that I had somehow downloaded a corrupt ISO image from MSDN, I went ahead and downloaded it again. However, even with the freshly downloaded ISO, I got the same error.

I then tried installing VS 2005 on the new SSP VM as well as the new front-end Web server VM (figuring I could deal with the SQL issue later before running the SharePoint Configuration Wizard). On both VMs, I got the following error when starting the setup:

Visual Studio 2005 Setup

An unknown error occured while copying files to your temporary folder.  Setup will now exit.

The last thing that I could think of was to copy the files from the "CD" (i.e. the mounted ISO file) to the local VHD. I opened a command prompt and started robocopying files, but I soon got the following error:

Error Performing Inpage Operation

And, no, KB 141117 was not any help.

Ugh!

Since I had never encountered these problems before when building out numerous other VMs, I figured the problem had to be with the Virtual Server host itself (i.e. the 8-proc server that runs the VMs for DEV). Therefore, I resorted to robocopying the VMs locally to my laptop (actually an external USB drive connected to my laptop), where I was able to successfully install SQL Server, MOSS, and Visual Studio 2005). I subsequently copied them back to the server.

[Another side note: if you are developing MOSS solutions on a laptop, I highly recommend that you use an external 7200 RPM USB drive for the VHD files. A few months ago, I started running my MOSS 2007 development VM on my laptop -- I had previously been running it exclusively on my home server -- and I noticed a huge impact on my productivity. The disk churn was unbearable. I tried running it on both the internal hard drive as well as an external 5400 RPM drive. Performance in both of these cases was unacceptable. I sent a message to one of our internal SharePoint DLs inquiring if others were suffering a similar slow death that I was. I suspected that the answer was to get a faster drive, but I wanted to get some evidence before placing the order.

Several people indicated that they lugged around full-size external USB hard drive enclosures in order to get acceptable perfomance. I've done that before -- I am not doing it again. I ordered a Seagate ST910021U2-RK 100GB 7200 RPM External Hard Drive and I've been quite pleased with the performance ever since. Sure, my home server with 4 drives in a RAID10 configuration is still much faster, but it is much, much better than it was.]

Anyway, back to the Virtual Server issues...I could not understand why there would be problems mounting certain ISO images on VMs running on the DEV server (before robocopying the VMs to my laptop, I was able to mount my slipstreamed Windows Server 2003 SP2 ISO image in order to install IIS, so I knew the problem wasn't with all ISO images).

I had encountered some strange errors in this Virtual Server environment before. Most notably, when I would robocopy a non-trivial amount of content from the Virtual Server host to one of the VMs, it seemed like the network adapter would get "saturated" -- if I was connected via Terminal Services to the VM then my connection would disconnect, or if I was using the VMRC then I would get "The network path was not found" errors soon after the starting the copy.

I was starting to think that perhaps there was just something fundamentally wrong with the DEV server and it was time for a complete rebuild of the server. However, I figured that I would first try reinstalling Virtual Server.

Before I uninstalled Virtual Server, I made a note of the version that was previously running in DEV (somebody else had initially configured this server long ago). The Virtual Server Administration Website displayed: 1.1.465.0 SE.

I removed Virtual Server and then downloaded the latest version from microsoft.com (it is now a free download). The Virtual Server Administration Website now displays: 1.1.465.292 EE R2.

You know what's coming next...

All of the problems appear to be resolved! After upgrading to Virtual Server 2005 R2, I can mount the ISOs and start the installation without getting the errors I encountered before. It also appears that the network adapter "saturation" problem is fixed as well (I was able to robocopy Visual Studio 2005 SP1 -- which I definitely consider to be a "non-trivial" amount of content).

Bottom line: it appears that quite a few bugs were fixed in Virtual Server 2005 R2. I highly recommend that you verify that all of your VM environments are running the latest version. I have been running R2 on my laptop as well as in the Jameson Data Center for so long that I never encountered these problems before.