A while ago I wrote about virtualization of Office Communication Server 2007 R2, OCS 2007 R2 had a limited supportability for virtualization” Only the Presence, IM (including remote access, federation, and PIC) and Group Chat workloads”.

The next release of Office Communications Server and Communicator together with Exchange 2010 is currently referred to as UC “Wave 14″ (code-name). The latest publicly available release date is in “late 2010”.

With Wave 14, OCS 2010 will support virtualization .. Yes it will :D

What’s supported?

  • Virtualization of specific Communications Server roles
  • SQL, Exchange, and AD virtualization where appropriate
  • Hyper-V R2 (not R1)
  • Client virtualization (except Audio / video) – use IP phone

“client virtualization technologies such as Citrix is supported for IM and meetings but audio and video is NOT supported .  Microsoft’s recommendations is to use an IP phone if virtualized desktops are used.”

What’s not supported?

  • Branch office / gateway only / mediation server + gateway
  • Standard edition servers (already a single box)
  • Live Migration of Communications Server VMs