A few weeks ago, I wrote a column highlighting Microsoft’s announcement of their Exchange 2007 virtualization strategy. I just found out that the team that owns the Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server and Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) has announced their virtualization policy… and it’s a good one! Basically, they’ll support ISA and TMG on virtualization solutions that are part of the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP)– including Hyper-V.
The full document is here. Here’s the money graf:
… if a hardware virtualization platform is listed as “validated” with the SVVP (not “under evaluation”), Microsoft ISA Server and Forefront TMG will be supported for production use on that platform within the limits prescribed in the Microsoft Product Support Lifecycle, Non-Microsoft hardware virtualization policies and the system requirements for that product version and edition.
This will make both ISA and TMG much more palatable to a wide variety of customers, particularly in the SMB space. I’m looking forward to redeploying ISA (which I haven’t been using for a few years) now that it won’t cost me a server’s worth of electricity to use.
Update: this VMware press release says that VMware ESX has passed the SVVP. This is huge news given that it essentially means Microsoft is now supporting Exchange, ISA, and TMG on the most widely deployed virtualization platforms– welcome air cover for all the folks who have been doing it for a while now 🙂
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