Running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a Virtualized Topology (update!)
Last Wednesday we already informed you on the new virtualization support policy for OCS:
Today Microsoft released a whitepaper about running Office Communications server 2007 on virtual servers.
The main conclusion: Yes it is supported as long as there isn't any realtime component involved.
So IM, Presence on the Enterprise Front-end and the Access Edge server is supported, also the SQL Server based OCS Backend and the Groupchat server roles.
All other roles are not supported on Hyper-V.
You can download the whitepaper on the following location:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0a45d921-3b48-44e4-b42b-19704a2b81b0&displaylang=en
Rumour has it that the virtualization policy will be updated even more in regard to VDI related solutions. The question is whether 2-way video will be supported via a (thin) client including webcam on a VDI based infrastructure.
Apparently the product group has worked on this issue and very soon the official support statement should be modified as follows:
Server-Side Application Virtualization
- Office Communicator 2005 supports Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame only when Office Communicator is used for text chats and presence functions.
- Office Communicator 2007 supports Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame when Office Communicator is used for text chats, presence and Remote Call Control (RCC) functions.
- Office Communicator 2007 R2 supports Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame when Office Communicator is used for text chats, presence, desktop sharing and Remote Call Control (RCC) functions.
- Office Live Meeting 2007 supports Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame for web conferencing functions.
Client-Side Application Virtualization
- Office Communicator 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 R2 support all of their native functions, including text chats, presence, desktop sharing (Office Communicator 2007 R2 only), Remote Call Control (RCC), audio and video, when used in Client-Side Application Virtualization mode (Microsoft Application Virtualization for Desktops 4.5).