Planning for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Topic Last Modified: 2012-09-18

As in Lync Server 2010, the main high availability scheme for most server roles in Lync Server 2013 is based on server redundancy via pooling. If a server running a certain server role fails, the other servers in the pool running the same role take the load of that server. This applies to Front End Servers, Edge Servers, Mediation Servers, and Directors.

Lync Server 2013 adds new disaster recovery measures for Front End pools by introducing geographical dispersement of your servers into two data centers to provide continuation of service should one entire pool or site go down.

Lync Server 2013 also enhances Back End Server high availability, by supporting synchronous SQL mirroring for your Back End databases.

This section explains these major high availability and disaster recovery features, and also covers what steps you can take for high availability and disaster recovery for your other server roles as well.