OCS 2007 R2 Virtualisation Support

We are pleased to announce official support for server virtualisation for Office Communications Server 2007 R2.

We are introducing support for both a fully distributed virtualised topology across several hypervisors and for a single server virtualised topology. These topologies are supported on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and any Server Virtualisation Validation Program (SVVP) certified partner solution (http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvp.htm).

Presence, Instant Messaging (including remote access, federation, and Public IM Connectivity) and Group Chat workloads are supported. The following server roles can be deployed:

• Front-End Servers
• Back-End SQL Server 2008 64 bits
• Group Chat Channel Servers
• Group Chat Compliance Servers
• Archiving Servers
• Monitoring (CDR only) Servers
• Edge Access Servers

The virtual machines must be running on Windows Server 2008 64-bit. Archiving Server and Monitoring Server can be connected to a virtualised Enterprise pool, but they must run on a physical server. The fully virtualised distributed topology has been tested to handle up to 40,000 users, including 10,000 group chat users.

Virtualisation of the other workloads is not supported because of possible quality issues with real-time media.

Specifically, voice, video, live meeting and desktop sharing workloads cannot be part of the virtualised deployment. Therefore audio/video/web conferencing servers, audio/video/web edge conferencing servers, dial-in conferencing, Communicator Web Access, enterprise voice, or Remote Call Control may not be deployed as part of the virtualised pool.

If any one of these workloads is required, a new pool with physical servers must be deployed for those users. For more information about support for client virtualisation technologies, please refer to the official support statement at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951152.

In order to plan both their physical and virtualised topologies, customers can use Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Capacity Planning Tool, which can simulate user load for the available workloads. This will help customers validating the hypervisor load and scalability before going to production.

For more information there is a whitepaper available for download: “Running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a Virtualized Topology” - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0a45d921-3b48-44e4-b42b-19704a2b81b0&displaylang=en

This document describes the results of a series of configurations that were run in a Hyper-V environment to validate that Office Communications Server on Hyper-V provides stable performance and scalability for production use.

The support statement at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd572860(office.13).aspx will be updated in the next few days to reflect this.