Do you want to build your own Lync lab and you need guideline, I’ll post a series of four parts for a walkthrough for my lab setup and configuration over the next period… So let’s start by part 1:

The Lab environment:

• Windows 2008 R2 as the OS for Lync
• Windows 2008 R2 Active Directory (mbdomain.ad)
• 1 Lync server SE (The Standard Edition server supports IM, presence, A/V conferencing and Web conferencing)
• 1 Lync consolidated Edge server (Will be used later)
• TMG as the edge firewall and reverse proxy (Will be used later)
• Windows 2008 R2 CA standalone
• Windows 7 for the Lync client
• Remote Admin is enabled on the Lync server

So I started with preparing the base OS, so I used a Windows Server 2008 R2 VHD from my image library and run the sysprep on it (don’t ever forget to select the Generalize option to create a new SID), attached it to my Hyper-V server and joined it to the domain (only the LyncSE server since Edge will be in workgroup). Now we need to install the following components on the Lync server as a setup prerequisites:

• IIS with the below components:

• Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 with SP1

You can use the below cmdlet for ease of deploying these components

Import-module Servermanager

Add-WindowsFeature NET-Framework,RSAT-ADDS,web-server,Web-Static-Content,Web-Default-Doc,Web-Http-Errors,Web-Http-Redirect,Web-Asp-Net,Web-Net-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Filter,Web-Http-Logging,Web-Log-Libraries,Web-Http-Tracing,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Client-Auth,Web-Filtering,Web-Stat-Compression,Web-Mgmt-Console,Web-Scripting-Tools –Restart

• From the installation media, navigate to \Setup\amd64\SQLNCLI.EXE and install the SQL Server native client program
• MS Silverlight plug-in
• Lync planning tool (can be downloaded from the web)
• On the Lync server, I created a file share named Lyncshare. Configured the administrator account to have full rights. Configured everyone else to have read only privileges.

Now let’s see the installation process itself:

1. The Autorun will open the below IE page where I selected the install Lync Server 2010 option

2. First thing the setup prompted me to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 redistributable, for sure I did

3. I accepted the default path below

4. First thing I selected the “prepare Active Directory” option

5. Run the ‘Prepare Schema’ option

6. Click on Next

7. After few min the schema extension finished successfully

8. Clicking on ‘view log’ showed the log with green status

9. Next step is ‘prepare current forest’ option

10. For the UG creation, I selected the local domain since I’m in a single domain anyway

11. Another green status

12. Now we need to prepare the current domain to set the ACEs for the UGs

13. Another green status

14. With this last step the Lync necessary groups are created in the mbdomain.ad

15. To allow access to the Lync admin control panel, manually I add the administrator account to the ‘CSAdministrator’ and the ‘RTCUniversalServerAdmins’ UG

16. After that from the setup menu I selected to deploy the topology builder

17. Next step is to prepare my SE server to host the Central Management Service with the SQL express, you can do so from the deployment wizard by clicking on ‘Prepare first standard edition server’ option

18. Another green status

Now we are ready for the deployment itself, in part 2 I’ll take you through these steps (don’t worry part 2 is almost ready for blogging)…