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Running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a Virtualized Topology

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

This article gives you an overview of Hyper-V in Windows Server® 2008 and how you can run Office Communications Server in a virtualized environment. Read this article to hit the highlights and then let it lead you to the detailed white paper "Running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a Virtualized Topology".

Author: Kate Gleeson

Publication date: January 2010

Product version: Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2

Office Communications Server and Windows Hyper-V

Is your organization looking to reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO) for your servers? Saving money is always a good thing. And, if you can ensure that you maintain or even improve your Quality of Service (QoS), even better.

The Windows Server® 2008 operating system includes Hyper-V™, which is a powerful virtualization technology that your corporate IT department can use to consolidate servers that are currently underused. By using Hyper-V with these underused servers, you can reduce TCO, and maintain or improve Quality of Service (QoS). The white paper "Running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a Virtualized Topology," available at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=165757, examines a series of test scenarios that represent best practice recommendations for running Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and SQL Server™ 2008 in Windows Hyper-V environment or other hypervisor technologies.

What Is Hyper-V?

Based on hypervisor technology, the Hyper-V virtualization feature in the Windows Server 2008 operating system is a thin layer of software between the hardware and the operating system that enables multiple operating systems to run, unmodified, on a host computer at the same time. Hyper-V opens the opportunity for more development and test environment types that otherwise might be constrained by hardware availability.

Which Workloads Can I Deploy with Hyper-V?

You can deploy Office Communications Server 2007 R2 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:

  • Presence

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

  • Group Chat

Note

For details about the Server Virtualization Validation Program, see https://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvp.htm.

The following workloads are not supported in a virtualized Office Communications Server 2007 R2 deployment:

  • Enterprise Voice

  • Remote call control

  • Response Group Service

  • Dial-in conferencing

  • Audio/video (A/V) conferencing

  • Web conferencing

  • Communicator Web Access desktop sharing

These workloads are not supported because of several factors, including packet loss, delay, jitter, and clock skew. These factors impact the quality and performance of real-time media when virtualized. However, these factors do not impact other workloads such as IM and presence because these workloads are less susceptible to delay and can use the natural retry mechanisms in the SIP protocol and the underlying TCP transport.

Which Hyper-V Topology Is Right for My Organization?

It is challenging to maintain the correct size hardware to consolidate current workloads and still provide room for growth. By adding virtualization, you can meet your organization’s capacity planning challenges. To help build virtualization topologies, we have released Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Capacity Planning Tool. The Capacity Planning Tool, available at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkId=169616, can simulate user load for most of the available workloads. This helps you to quickly validate the hypervisor load and scalability before you go into production.

The white paper "Running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a Virtualized Topology" does the following:

  • Identifies which server roles are supported in a virtualized environment.

  • Provides guidance for scaling users and workloads in a virtualized environment.

  • 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.

For details, see the white paper "Running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a Virtualized Topology," available at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=165757.

Office Communications Server Resources