Running Microsoft OCS (Office communicator Standard ) in a VMware

[GFFG]

Has anyone here ran this product in a VM before?

[TomHowarth]

We investigated the posibility of running this as a VM but due to restrictions on features under a virtualised environent we decided to remain physical with it.

If you found this or any other answer useful please consider the use of the Helpful or correct buttons to award points

Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

Contributing author for the upcoming book "[VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment|http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780136083214]”. Currently available on roughcuts

[jozsef]

OCS Standard will only run in a VM if you only use IM and presence information due to Audio Visual restrictions in VMware.

Enterprise edition you can load balance with a physical box for Audio Visual and a VM for IM and Presence.

Regards

Joe

[GFFG]

Thanks again for this information, this is useful information and helps in the longer term planning.

Regards, Kyle

[runclear]

I have OCS R2 Standard running here with around 250 SIP users (and currently working to scale out to 2,500 SIP users total)... .No performance issues what so ever...

We only use OCS for IM though - and very few Live Meeting Conferences...

-edit, i will add that a handful of users also use the "pc-to-pc" call functionallity (microphone) type calls.. I've seen no issues t hus far, and the "pc calls" have been clear and crisp.

-

---

[GFFG]

Our mandate is to hook into exchange and put 25 new phones on people's desks, all linked into OCS. If everything can run on one physical server for now that would be great. Perhaps in the future we could run it on Vmware as a P2V experiment or as you say off load a "IM" feature into a OCS VM for load balancing. I'm almost thinking with Vsphere Fault Tolerate (single cpu only) might work to cluster it. However for now physical seems to be the answer until we gain knowledge to run it in Vmware.

Regards, Kyle

[runclear]

well if your going to roll with voip, then you are required to purchase the "enterprise" cal - as that feature is not included in the Standard cal..... Standing up multiple servers / breaking off roles is super easy using OCS...

Migrating users to a new "pool" is easy too - simple as "clicking the user using the OCS managment tool and - "migrate to 'poolname'"

edit -> ie: you "could" stand up a Pool with your VM's for testing and also setup a Pool with yoru physical OCS servers and migrate users between the hardware so you can do testing between the two.

-

---

[HChristenson]

We are running OCS R1 with 23,000 users on the VMWare ESX 2.5 virtual center with ESX host on 3.5 currently. The environment works great for the most part. As volume usage rises with video we are experiencing some quality of voice issues. Microsoft is pointing this issue to running on a virtual environment vs physical. The utilization of the current servers are not being stress from stats that reviewed. We are running IM/presence, Web/Video conferencing, edge servers and front ends used. Is anyone else experiencing issues like this? Other elements of the environment could be the real issue.

We are looking towards R2 and are being warned to go physical servers for the environment. Does anyone know of any cases where the VMware environment has been proven out for OCS 2007 R1 or OCS 2007 R2 environment?

[GFFG]

Side note: Do not run OCS Standard R2 on WIN2K8 R2, not supported. Conferencing failed for us, we had to go back to OCS 2007 R2 on Win2k8 SP2.

Our deployment is only 30 users for IM/VIDEO. Set to expand to 250. Sorry I can't be more help.

Regards, Kyle