Pool Components

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.

Conceptually, a pool consists of one or more Front End Servers and one or more databases on the Back-End Database Server with a single SQL Server. In a pool, all persistent states are stored in the database on the Back-End Database Server, so that when a Front End Server component fails, failover can be quick.

Figure 3 shows a sample Enterprise pool.

Figure 3.   Enterprise pool in a Consolidated Configuration with Homogeneous Front End Servers

In the diagram, there are two Front End Servers and one Back-End Database Server. There is a hardware load balancer for the Front End Servers. All conferencing elements—Focus, Focus Factory, Conferencing Server Factory, A/V Conferencing Server, Web Conferencing Server, IM Conferencing Server, and Telephony Conferencing Server—are installed on all Front End Servers in an Enterprise Edition consolidated configuration with multiple Front End Servers.

In an Enterprise Edition expanded configuration, you can deploy the Front End Server, Web Components Server, Web Conferencing Server, and A/V Conferencing Server on separate computers. The IM Conferencing Server and Telephony Conferencing Server, however, are always automatically installed on the same computer as the Front End Server.

A hardware load balancer is required in an Enterprise pool that has more than one Enterprise Edition server. (If your pool consists of only one Front End Server, which is connected to a separate Back-End Database Server running SQL Server, a load balancer is not required.) Only one load balancer is required, but you can optionally create two logical load balancers—one for the Front End Servers and one for the Web Components Server—if you deploy Enterprise Edition in an expanded configuration. If you want to employ two logical load balancers, you can configure two virtual IP (VIP) addresses on one physical load balancer, or you can configure two separate physical load balancers.