leedesmond’s blog

Running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a Virtualized Topology:
Best Practices and Performance Considerations (link)

This is an update of the Microsoft white paper describing the virtualization support policy for Office Communications Server 2007 R2. In a nutshell, the supported workloads remain unchanged i.e. Instant Messaging, Presence and Group Chat. The product is not designed to support virtualized real-time traffic as there is no guarantee of stable performance and scalability for production use nor consistent, acceptable user experience at this point in time.

To quote …

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. This occurs because of several factors, including packet loss, delay, jitter, and clock skew.

Further …

Desktop virtualization is not supported. The client should be installed on physical client computers.

Depending on your strategic goals, environment and user base, this may not necessarily be of any relevance, importance or concern from a usability or (official Microsoft) supportability perspective. Obviously your mileage may vary and the risks associated with deploying a virtualized topology may be tolerable for a limited number of concurrent users running any form of time sensitive traffic.

Technorati tags: LCS/OCS, OCS 2007, Virtualization

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