Appendix A: Configuring an Array of Standard Edition Servers as a Director

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

For larger deployments with external access enabled, you might want to deploy an array of Office Communications Server 2007 servers rather than an Enterprise pool to function as a Director. Servers in this array are connected through a load balancer and share a virtual IP address. The load balancer routes each incoming communication to a computer in the array, which then routes the communication to the internal Office Communications Server 2007 server.

Figure 9. Access Edge Server Topology with two Directors

In the configuration shown in the previous figure, the following virtual IP addresses are assigned to the load balancers as follows:

• VIP0 is the virtual IP address of the external interface of the Access Edge Server array (AP1 and AP2).

• VIP1 is the virtual IP address of the internal interface of the Access Edge Server array (AP1 and AP2).

• VIP2 is the virtual IP address of the Directory array (DIR1 and DIR 2), which is visible to the perimeter network.

In the previous figure, the IP address of each network element is labeled below the network element. For illustrative purposes, assume that the following FQDN for each network element is as shown in the following table.

Table 40 Network elements and associated FQDNs

Depending on whether you deploy an Enterprise pool with a back-end database that contains no user data or multiple Standard Edition servers as an array, the configuration of the array varies. The primary differences are as follows:

• The certificates that are installed on the Standard Edition servers must have the computer FQDN in the SUBJECT field and the FQDN of the virtual IP address of the Director must be listed in the SUBJECT_ALT_NAME field.

• At the forest level, the global default route for federation must point to the FQDN of the virtual IP address of the Director. In the case of an Enterprise pool, it must point to the FQDN of the Enterprise pool.

• The default route for federation on each of the Standard Edition servers in the Director array must point to the FQDN of the virtual IP address of the Access Edge Server array. This setting is configured on the Federation tab of each Standard Edition server or Enterprise pool. If an Enterprise pool is used as a Director, this setting is made only once, at the pool level.

• Individual server names must be listed on the list of internal servers authorized to connect to the Access Edge Server on the Internal tab of the edge server properties, in addition to the FQDN of the virtual IP address of the Director. For a Standard Edition server array, the FQDN of the load balancer used by the array must be entered on this list as well.

• DNS entries must be added for each Standard Edition server in the perimeter network, in addition to the FQDN of the virtual IP address.