Lotus Notes and iNotes support policy for hosted virtual desktop environments

Customers can employ various applications to provide an emulated or virtual client operating environment in order to meet their needs, such as to provide easy-to-deploy environments to a distributed workforce, centralized management, a standardized client that can be accessed from multiple locations, or to host dynamic test environments. The virtual environment by design provides transparency to the operating systems, applications, and middleware that operate above it.

Some of these environments are not used during the official testing of IBM Lotus Notes and iNotes; therefore, certain considerations must be taken into account prior to deploying these products in such an environment.

Solutions providing hosted desktop virtualization environments include (but are not limited to) product offerings like IBM Virtual Desktop for Smart Business (VDSB), VMWare View, Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft VDI suite, and VERDE from Virtual Bridges. When a customer contacts IBM Remote Technical Support with a standard usage or defect-related service request, running in such an environment, IBM will make commercially reasonable efforts to resolve the issue. We will assume that the problem is common to both native and virtual environments. However, when it appears that the problem is unique to the virtualized or emulated environment, IBM may require the customer to recreate the problem in a native environment to proceed with the investigation. If the problem is unique to the emulated environment and IBM is not able to resolve the problem, then Support will expect the customer to work with the support organization for the virtualization or emulation product in question to provide resolution. If the support organization for the virtualization or emulation product is unable to resolve the problem, IBM Support reserves the right to deem that version, release, or Fix Pack level of the virtualization or emulation product in question to be "Not Supported" in relation to the system requirements for Lotus Notes (technote #7007909) and iNotes (technote #7007763).

This risk must be considered when deploying Lotus Notes and iNotes in such an environment, and customers are encouraged to test problems themselves on a native installation of the operating system prior to contacting IBM Support to exclude the virtual environment as a possible cause.

In addition, IBM Support has no performance benchmarking or tuning guidance available that is unique to such environments. Any additional memory or other hardware requirements must be accounted for when planning or deploying Lotus Notes and iNotes in a virtualized environment.

Notes:
1. The above applies to service requests within scope for Passport Advantage support as per the "Software Support Handbook."

2. The above statement is for Remote Technical Support only and does not indicate whether IBM products are "certified" to operate in a Hosted Virtual Desktop environment. Official environment statements are made in individual IBM product announcements.

3. The above statement applies to virtualized desktop environments hosting an already-supported Notes or iNotes operating system or browser version. For a specific list, see the system requirements for Lotus Notes (technote #7007909) and iNotes (technote #7007763).

4. The above support statement does not apply to terminal services, hosted virtual application, or application streaming environments. As we review and revise our virtualization support strategy, this technote will be updated with additional information.

5. The above support statement does not apply to Lotus products other than Notes and iNotes. As we review and revise our virtualization support strategy, this technote will be updated with additional product support information.