Microsoft OCS Virtualization Announcement
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 10:06AM Microsoft OCS Virtualization Announcement
On Wednesday, May 13, 2009, Microsoft made an important announcement regarding which Office Communications Server R2 roles would be supported on Virtual Machines. In short, they are supporting any role that does not have a Media payload. Put another way, only IM (including Remote Access, Federation, and Public IM), Presence and Group Chat Workloads are supported. Remember, if you stray from these rules, your environment will not be in a supported configuration. If you call for help from Microsoft they will usually provide you best effort to solve your issues.
So, if your environment includes the words AV, Voice, Live Meeting, multi-party IMs or Enterprise Voice you will not be able to virtualize any of the supporting roles or hardware! This includes the Front Ends, Edge Servers, Mediation Servers, CWA servers and depending on who you speak to, the Enterprise Edition Back End servers. If you are only supporting two way IMs between internal and/or external users, you should be able to virtualize your entire OCS environment. If you plan on doing more, to paraphrase “The Sopranos”, fuggedaboutit if you want to be in a supported configuration from Microsoft.
More bad news, it doesn’t sound like Microsoft is going to support virtualizing the Archiving or Monitoring servers.
For more information, check out the announcement from the Unified Communications Team at Microsoft
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Reader Comments (1)
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