I’m troubleshooting some problems with my Exchange server at the moment and the ExBPA led me to a knowledge base article about running Exchange Server in a virtualised environment. Whilst reading that, I can across Microsoft knowledge base article 897615, which discusses the support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualisation software.

I’ll paraphrase it as “If you have Premier support and you use our virtualisation software, we’ll try and work out what the issue is (we use Virtual Server 2005 R2 to do that anyway). If you don’t have Premier support, then you should, and you need to proove that it’s nothing to do with virtualisation (i.e. can you replicate the issue on physical hardware). If you have a Premier agreement but you use another vendor’s virtualisation software then we’ll try our best, but you’ll probably have to proove the problem is not caused by the virtualisation software”. The crux of this is the statement that:

“Microsoft does not test or support Microsoft software running in conjunction with non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software.”

This might be worth considering whilst selecting which (if any) virtualisation platform is right for an organisation.