Virtualization support for Office Communications Server 2007 R2

A great relief for the customers who wanted to deploy OCS in virtualized environment!

Microsoft has officially announced that it would support following services in hypervisor technology…

• Presence

• IM (including remote access, federation, and Public IM Connectivity)

• Group Chat

Hold on!!!! Only OCS 2007 R2 is supported in virtualized network! OCS 2007 R1 is still not supported in virtualized network.

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 can be deployed onto Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, or onto any virtualization solution that is a certified partner through the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) certified partners for the following workloads:

For more information about the Server Virtualization Validation Program, see here .

Enterprise Voice, Remote Call Control (RCC), Response Group Service, dial-In conferencing, audio/video conferencing, Web conferencing, and Communicator Web Access desktop sharing workloads are not supported in a virtualized Office Communications Server 2007 R2 deployment.

Following Features and roles are supported in virtualized environment. Other roles and features are not supported!

Role	Supported	Supported features	Unsupported features
Enterprise front-end server	Yes	Presence, IM	Enterprise Voice, audio/video
Standard Edition Server	No
IM Conferencing Server	Yes	IM Conferencing
Access Edge Server	Yes	Remote Access
		Federation, Public IM Connectivity
SQL Server back-end server	Yes	Office Communications Server Backend
Group Chat Channel Server	Yes	Channel Server
Group Chat Look-up Server	Yes	Channel and Load balancing management
Group Chat back-end server	Yes	Group Chat database
Group Chat Compliance Server	Yes	Compliance
Group Chat Compliance back-end server	Yes	Compliance database
Director	No

Following table lists supported clients and corresponding features in a virtual environment.

Client	Tested and Supported	Unsupported feature(s)
Office Communicator 2007 R2	Yes	Enterprise Voice, PBX integration, audio/video, Remote Call Control Auto-update, desktop sharing, conferencing, Response group
Office Communicator 2007 R2 Group Chat Console	Yes
Office Communicator Mobile	No
Live Meeting Console	No
Office Communicator 2007 R2 Attendant	No
Office Communicator Phone Edition	No

When you are planning a virtualized deployment of Office Communications Server, you must consider the following planning phases before you deploy Office Communications Server 2007 R2:

• Hypervisor, which can be either one of the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) certified partners or Microsoft Server 2008 Hyper-V.

• SQL Server 2008 running in a Hyper-V environment.

• Office Communications Server 2007 R2 running in a Hyper-V environment.

You can download Microsoft guide about support of OCS on virtualization...

“Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Started with Hyper-V”