Chapter 25. Virtualization

Many organizations today are moving to take advantage of the cost savings and flexibility of server virtualization. Live Communications Server had no official support policy and Office Communications Server 2007 R2 had a limited set of features that were supported in a virtual environment. With Lync Server 2010, Microsoft has finally introduced support for virtualizing every single workload from IM and presence to A/V conferencing to telephony integration with virtualized Mediation Servers. This change is going to allow many companies to reduce hardware costs and virtualize the Lync Server 2010 deployment.

This chapter begins with a basic overview of what virtualization is and what benefits a company can realize by leveraging virtualization. It also discusses some of the common features and the different names for it as it is used in competing products such as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.

Although virtualization of each role is now possible, there are some strict requirements for what is supported and what is not supported when using virtual Lync Servers. This chapter covers what those support boundaries are and what some of the surprise restrictions might be. Sample topologies of a few different deployment models are also included.

Lastly, this chapter covers requirements and best practices for the host servers and for the virtual machine guest servers that run Lync Server 2010 roles. This includes processor, memory, disk, and network considerations for each type of server.