Chapter 29. Virtualization Support

The majority or organizations today, big and small, take advantage of the cost savings and flexibility of server virtualization in one form or another. Many now operate a “virtualize first” policy for new server deployments and are moving to a “Private Cloud” model for their internal IT. Lync Server 2010 was the first release to support virtualizing every workload, from IM and presence to A/V conferencing to Enterprise Voice. Lync Server 2013 continues to support virtualization of all workloads and adds support for some new virtualization technologies (such as Single-Root I/O Virtualization and support for more than four virtual processors) to enable better performance and scalability in a virtualized environment.

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

Although virtualization of each role is possible, there are some strict requirements around what is supported and what is not supported when virtual Lync Servers are used. This chapter covers the configuration of Lync virtual servers and virtualization hosts for Lync. This includes processor, memory, disk, and network considerations for each type of server. Sample topologies of some different virtual deployment models are also included. This should give the reader a good understanding of the support boundaries.

Lastly, this chapter covers some notes on client and desktop virtualization followed by overall virtualization best practices.