Lync Server 2013 Virtualisation Whitepaper From Microsoft

Ever since Microsoft introduced Live Communications Server, customers have been asking how they can virtualize the product. During the OCS years, I constantly heard requests for support for Virtualisation. But the answer remained: no support. Eventually Microsoft did the work necessary to validate fully the product in a virtual environment. The result is that, today, you can fully virtualize both the Lync server and the Lync client product. But it’s not all that simple – virtualization just adds more opportunity for problems.

While many workloads are a great fit for virtualization, Lync is a real real-time application. As such, there can be performance related issues that are not even noticeable with other workloads. These issues manifest as poor audio and video resulting in a poor service to the user.

In a recently published White Paper, Lync Server 2013 Virtualization White Paper Microsoft provides full guidance for planning a Lync Server deployment in a virtual environment. The white paper descries how to configure Lync Server 2013 in a virtual environment, including both the host and the guest VMs. Also included are the most important Key Health Indicators (KHIs) that you should watch both when performing a capacity test prior to deploying, and later during deployment.

If you are planning a Lync deployment in a virtual environment or if you want to consider virtualizing part of your existing Lync infrastructure, you really should read this paper.

del.icio.us Tags: Lync