Virtualized environments

It is very likely that you are working in an environment that is running at least some virtualized infrastructure and virtualized machines. It is also possible for the VMs to act as the server for your SQL Server 2014 instances. Due to the subtle difference virtualization offers over physical hardware, there are some additional considerations you will need to make. There are various best practices that have been suggested when running SQL Server on an enterprise hypervisor platform. The following excerpt is taken from the Microsoft SQL Server documentation also available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn529286(v=sql.120).aspx:

"Some best practices for virtualizing and managing SQL Server need to be modified when virtualizing a database with memory-optimized tables. Without memory-optimized tables, two of the best practices are:

If memory pre-allocation is used with SQL Server, it is better to assign only the amount of memory that is required so sufficient...