Ok so support for virtualization is finally here, for some roles and scenarios that is…
There is a whitepaper describing more.
Running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a Virtualized Topology
Brief Description
This whitepaper defines the supported topologies and provides best practice recommendations for running Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and SQL Server™ 2008 in a Windows Hyper-V environment or other hypervisor technologies.
From that we can see that it is only Presence, Instant Messaging (including remote access, federation, and Public IM Connectivity) and Group Chat that are supported. The following server roles can be deployed on virtual machines:
- Front-End Servers
- Back-End SQL Server 2008 64 bits
- Group Chat Channel Servers
- Group Chat Compliance Servers
- Edge Access Servers
Virtualization of the other workloads is not supported because of possible quality issues with real-time media.
Specifically, voice, video, live meeting and desktop sharing workloads cannot be part of the virtualized deployment. Therefore audio/video/web conferencing servers, audio/video/web edge conferencing servers, dial-in conferencing, Communicator Web Access, enterprise voice, or Remote Call Control may not be deployed as part of the virtualized pool.
On the client side the KB article says this.
Support for the Microsoft unified communications clients in Application Virtualization environments
Server-Side Application Virtualization
- Office Communicator 2005 supports Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame only when Office Communicator is used for text chats and presence functions.
- Office Communicator 2007 supports Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame when Office Communicator is used for text chats, presence functions, and Remote Call Control (RCC) functions.
- Office Communicator 2007 R2 supports Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame when Office Communicator is used for text chats, presence functions, desktop sharing, and Remote Call Control (RCC) functions.
- Office Live Meeting 2007 supports Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame for Web conferencing functions.
Client-Side Application Virtualization
Office Communicator 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 R2 support all native functions. This includes text chats, presence functions, desktop sharing (Office Communicator 2007 R2 only), Remote Call Control (RCC), audio, and video when you use them in Client-Side Application Virtualization mode (Microsoft Application Virtualization for Desktops 4.5).