Microsoft's Virtualization Support Policies (KB897613,KB897614,KB897615)
With every presentation about Virtual Server 2005 I get a lot of questions about Microsoft's vision regarding support of Microsoft products in a virtual environment.As far as I'm aware Microsoft published three Knowledge Base articles about this matter.
The first article
Microsoft Virtual Server Support Policy (897613) addresses support provided by Microsoft for Windows Server System software running within a Microsoft Virtual Server environment. Microsoft supports Windows Server System software running within a Microsoft Virtual Server environment subject to the Microsoft Support Lifecycle policy and use of the virtual hard disk (.vhd) format. The second article, Windows Server System software not supported within a Microsoft Virtual Server environment (897614) lists which Windows Server System software is not supported within a Microsoft Virtual Server environment. The last update is from april 13 2005 and excludes the following products:
- Microsoft Speech Server. Speech Server requires telephony hardware not available in a virtualized hardware environment, and thus Speech Server is not supported when run within Virtual Server.
- Microsoft Certificate Server. Certificate Server is supported starting with Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition SP1 and Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition SP1 as the host and guest operating systems.
- Microsoft ISA Server. ISA Server is currently not supported running within Microsoft Virtual Server. Support for ISA Server within Virtual Server is expected in a future release.
- Microsoft Exchange Server. Exchange is currently not supported running within Microsoft Virtual Server. Exchange will be supported within Virtual Server starting with Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 and subsequent releases.
- Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. SharePoint Portal Server is currently not supported running within Virtual Server. Support for SharePoint Portal Server within Virtual Server is expected in a future release
The final article Support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software (897615) addresses support provided by Microsoft for its software running in conjunction with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software. There seems to be third parties who also have software on the market providing this functionality (never heard of them, hee,hee).
Greetings, Daniel.
