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Unified communications servers and virtualization do mix, more enterprises find. But desktop virtualization and UC remains tricky.

?Until now, UC has sat outside of the world of virtualization,? said Irwin Lazar, a VP at Nemertes Research, in his introduction to a panel discussion at UBM?s Enterprise Connect conference. The trend throughout the IT industry is to consolidate applications that used to run on individual servers so that multiple apps run on a single server, with isolation between the applications provided by virtual partitions between operating system instances.

Initially, UC was left out of the equation because network managers hesitated to subject any application for the transmission of realtime audio or video to the overhead imposed by virtualization, Lazar said. However, virtualization is not as novel as it once was and many network managers have become skilled at running all sorts of workloads in that environment. Rather than running up against diminishing returns, it seems ?the more you virtualize, the more you realize the benefits of virtualization,? Lazar said.

[ What's the next step beyond presence? Avaya Gives Peek At Future Of Collaboration. ]

The videoconferencing firm Vidyo introduced the VidyoRouter Virtual Edition earlier this week, and it was one of the Best of Show finalists. Vidyo is initially targeting VMware platforms, with additional virtualization environments to follow.

Mark Noble, senior director of product marketing at Vidyo, said his company is capitalizing on an architectural difference between its products and those of most of its competitors. ?We?re not doing heavy duty video transcoding at the core like on a traditional MCU,? he said. The multipoint control units used in most videoconferencing rely on a processor-intensive mixing and redistributing of video streams, usually on purpose-built hardware. Vidyo uses the H.264 Scalable Video Coding compression standard, sending a complete copy of each stream to each location and relying on software in each endpoint to sort it out.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/voip_audio_conferencing/232700539

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