Virtualization technology?

Here is a question I received today and I thought I would attempt to address it here -

Hi Tom,

Do you have any knowledge, or reference to anyone deploying LCS 2005 components on virtual servers? E.g. when deploying an Enterprise pool, is it possible to use a single (or series of) virtual server as the front end, whilst using a physical SQL instance as the back end?

The current Knowledge Base article for Virtual Server support includes this link for the Live Communications Server Planning Guide.

The text that we need for this discussion is the following Note:

Live Communications Server 2005 Standard Edition is supported on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. Current benchmarks on the recommended hardware, as specified in this guide support up to 500 users. For additional information about scaling and hardware requirements for Virtual Server deployments of Live Communications Server 2005, visit the Live Communications Server partner page at https://directory.partners.extranet.microsoft.com/advsearchresults.aspx?productscsv=25. For additional information about Virtual Server 2005, visit the Virtual Server Web site at https://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/default.mspx.

 Are customers deploying beyond this recommendation? Sure, but the key thing to remember is the support aspect. When you encounter a problem and you need support, there will come a point at which you would need to reproduce the behavior/problem outside of the virtual solution you have in place.