Set Up Standard Edition Hardware and System Infrastructure

 

Topic Last Modified: 2012-01-24

Before you set up Standard Edition server and publish your topology, set up your hardware and system infrastructure by doing the following:

  • Install the hardware for each component you have planned to install in your infrastructure. This includes all required computers, such as your Standard Edition server, database server for other roles, and Edge Server as appropriate in your planned design. Confirm that you have followed the recommendations for the number and speed for network adapters. If you will be using hardware load balancers, make sure that you have the proper information from the vendor to configure them for use with Lync Server 2010. If you will be using a file server or other server to house the file share required by Lync Server, ensure that the server is available and ready for the configuration of the file share. For details about how to define a topology that specifies the components needed for your deployment, see Defining the Topology in Topology Builder. For details about hardware requirements for servers, see Supported Hardware in the Supportability documentation.

  • Ensure that the networking infrastructure meets requirements. For details, see Network Infrastructure Requirements in the Planning documentation.

  • Set up Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). Setting Up AD DS includes preparing AD DS and defining all components that you want to deploy in AD DS. For details about preparing AD DS, see Preparing Active Directory Domain Services for Lync Server 2010 in the Deployment documentation.

  • Set up the required permissions for creating the file share. Permissions for use of file shares by Lync Server are automatically configured by Topology Builder when you publish your topology. However, the user account used to publish the topology must have full control (read/write/modify) on the file share in order for Topology Builder to configure the required permissions. To ensure that the file share can be managed properly during the Topology Builder publishing process, the user or domain group that the user is a member of should be made a member of the local Administrators group on the computer where the file share is located. In a multi-domain scenario, Domain A user or Group should be made a member of the local Administrators group on the machine in Domain B where the file share will be located.

  • Install and set up the hardware load balancer for Web Services. For Standard Edition server, this does not apply to the Front End Server, however, it does apply when deploying a Director because you can deploy a pool of Directors. With Domain Name System (DNS) load balancing deployed, you still need to also use hardware load balancers for these pools, but only for HTTP/HTTPS traffic. The hardware load balancer is used for HTTPS traffic from clients over ports 443 and 80. Although you still need hardware load balancers for these pools, their setup and administration will be primarily for HTTP/HTTPS traffic, which the administrators of the hardware load balancers are accustomed to.

After you complete all of the preparation tasks as described in this topic, but prior to publishing the topology, you also need to perform the other preparation tasks, including installing Windows operating systems and other prerequisite software, setting up Internet Information Services (IIS) on the Standard Edition server, configuring SQL Server for other roles, and configuring DNS. For details about these tasks, see the following topics: