Virtualizing Project Server 2007

This Office product will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see , Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

Server virtualization offers Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 customers the opportunity to run multiple operating systems on a single physical computer. This enables the consolidation of underutilized servers onto a smaller number of fully utilized computers. By implementing virtualization, companies can minimize operational and capital costs associated with deploying and operating the servers required for enterprise applications.

The Windows Server 2008 operating system provides the Hyper-V technology to accommodate server consolidation through virtualization of multiple operating-system instances onto a single physical server.

The key scenarios for implementing Hyper-V are:

• Server Consolidation   Minimize server footprint and operational and capital expenditure (TCO) associated with running applications by consolidating multiple physical servers onto one computer.

• Testing and Development   Using virtual machines, developers and architects can quickly provision new computers to try out new technology and scenarios in a safe environment that accurately reflects the characteristics of a physical environment. Virtualization enables new computers to be provisioned running on a wide platform of operating systems without new hardware being required. This provides a great platform for testing and development environments.

• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery   Hyper-V includes powerful business continuity and disaster recovery features such as live backup and quick migration, which enables businesses to meet their service-level agreements.

• Dynamic Data Center   By combining Hyper-V with the Microsoft System Center suite of tools, organizations can automate virtual machine configuration and monitoring.

The information in these articles directly relates to the Server Consolidation and Development scenarios for Hyper-V.

Supportability of Project Server 2007 SP1 and SQL Server 2005 on a Hyper-V virtualized environment

Office Project Server 2007 is fully supported when installed on a supported operating system that is running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. Support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 when installed on a supported operating system that is running on Hyper-V is provided as “commercially reasonable” support. “Commercially reasonable support” is defined as all reasonable support efforts by Microsoft Customer Service & Support (CSS) that do not require code fixes for SQL Server 2005.

Hyper-V overview

There are many compelling reasons to consider deploying a production Office Project Server 2007 solution in a Hyper-V virtualized environment. While there is some performance overhead associated with the virtualization layer that enables running a guest operating system on a virtual machine, one of the primary design goals of Hyper-V was to minimize this overhead and therefore maximize performance of guest operating systems. Guest operating systems running in a Hyper-V virtual machine provide performance approaching the performance of an operating system running on physical hardware if the necessary virtual server client (VSC) drivers and services are installed on the guest operating system. Hyper-V virtual server client (VSC) code, also known as Hyper-V enlightened I/O, enables direct access to the Hyper-V “Virtual Machine Bus” and is available with the installation of Hyper-V integration services. Both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista support Hyper-V enlightened I/O with Hyper-V integration services. Hyper-V integration services that provide VSC drivers are also available for other client operating systems, including Windows Server 2003.

See Also

Concepts

Hyper-V Architecture (Project Server 2007)
Deploying Project Server 2007 on Hyper-V
Best Practices for using Project Server 2007 on Hyper-V
Installing and configuring Project Server 2007 and Hyper-V
System Resource Costs of Hyper-V (Project Server 2007)