Lync Server 2010 Documentation Update and Tools Release: March 2011

Today the Microsoft Lync Server documentation team released an update to the technical library, which includes planning for metropolitan site resiliency and guidance on deploying in multiple forests. Additionally, the Lync Server product team released a capacity planning calculator and the Lync Server 2010 stress and performance tool.

Author: Patricia Anderson

Publication date: March 3, 2011

Product version: Lync Server 2010

Today, we released an update to the Lync Server 2010 Technical Library, including the release of two new tools for capacity planning.

New Tools

Two new tools are now available to assist you with capacity planning in Lync deployments:

Lync Server 2010 Capacity Calculator at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=212657
Lync Server 2010 Stress and Performance Tool at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=212599.

New Documentation

The March release includes the following new topics in the technical library:

Planning for Metropolitan Site Resiliency
Deploying in a multiple forest environment
Online documentation for the Lync Server 2010 Stress and Performance Tool. A Word version is also included in the tool set up.

March Updates

In addition, we corrected the following errors found in our documentation:

We corrected our guidance on deploying Edge Servers. Previously, our documentation said that deploying Edge Servers in an Active Directory domain was not supported. That was an error. This is now corrected in the Deployment Best Practices for External User Access topic at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg398123.aspx.

We note two important points:

We recommend that you deploy Edge Servers in a workgroup rather than a domain. Doing so simplifies installation and keeps Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) out of the perimeter network. Locating AD DS in the perimeter network can present a significant security risk.
Joining an Edge Server to a domain located entirely in the perimeter network is supported but not recommended. An Edge Server should never be part of a domain in the internal network.
We also clarified the SQL Server database collocation and database instances. The supportability topics and all other topics referencing database collocation are now updated.