Define a Single Director in Topology Builder
Topic Last Modified: 2012-06-17
If you enable access for external users by deploying Edge Servers, you can optionally deploy a Director. A Director is a server running Microsoft Lync Server 15 that authenticates user requests, but does not home any user accounts. When you use a Director to authenticate external users, it does the following:
Pre-authenticates incoming user requests Dropping invalid messages and user requests relieves the Front End pool from the overhead of performing authentication of these users and messages.
Helps insulate internal Front End pools from malicious traffic, such as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
Ends traffic at the Director when the network is flooded with invalid external traffic in a DoS or similar attack. As a result, internal users should not experience any effect on performance.
To deploy any of the servers running Lync Server 15, you must use Topology Builder first to define and publish your topology, including your Director and Edge Server topology.
This topic describes the steps to define the optional Director configurations for deployment in your internal network. The two possible Director topologies that can be defined are as follows:
To define the Director (single instance)
To define the Director (multiple Director pool)
Lync Server 15 Directors can be single-instance servers or they can be installed as a load-balanced pool of multiple Directors for higher availability and capacity. Both hardware load balancing and Domain Name System (DNS) load balancing are supported. This topic explains how to configure DNS load balancing for Director pools.
To successfully publish, enable, or disable a topology when you add or remove a server role, you should be logged on as a user who is a member of the RTCUniversalServerAdmins and Domain Admins groups. You can also delegate the proper administrator rights and permissions for adding server roles. For details, see Delegate Setup Permissions in the Standard Edition server or Enterprise Edition server Deployment documentation. For other configuration changes, only membership in the RTCUniversalServerAdmins group is required.
To define the Director (single instance)
Start Topology Builder: Click Start, click All Programs, click Microsoft Lync Server 2010, and then click Lync Server Topology Builder.
On the welcome page, click Download Topology from Existing Deployment.
In the Save Topology As dialog box, type the name and location of the local copy of the existing topology, and then click Save.
Expand the site in which you plan to add the Director, right-click Director pools, and then click New Director Pool.
In the Define the Director pool FQDN dialog box, do the following:
In Pool FQDN, type the FQDN for the Director pool.
Click Single computer pool, and then click Next.
In the Define the file share dialog box, do one of the following:
To use an existing file share, click Use a previously defined file share, select a file share from the list, and then click Next.
To create a new file share, click Define a new file share, type the FQDN for the location of the file share in File Server FQDN, type the name of the share in File Share, and then click Next.
Important
The file share that you specify or create in this step must exist or be created prior to publishing the topology.
In the Specify the Web Services URL dialog box, in External Base URL, specify the FQDN for the Directors, and then click Finish.
Important
The name must be resolvable from Internet DNS servers and point to the public IP address of the reverse proxy, which listens for HTTP/HTTPS requests to that URL and proxies them to the external Web Services virtual directory on that Director.
Publish the topology.
To define the Director (multiple Director pool)
Start Topology Builder: Click Start, click All Programs, click Microsoft Lync Server 2010, and then click Lync Server Topology Builder.
On the welcome page, click Download Topology from Existing Deployment.
In the Save Topology As dialog box, type the name and location of the local copy of the existing topology, and then click Save.
Expand the site in which you plan to add the Director, right-click Director pools, and then click New Director Pool.
In the Define the Director pool FQDN dialog box, do the following:
In Pool FQDN, type the FQDN for the Director pool.
Click Multiple computer pool, and then click Next.
In the Define the computers in this pool dialog box, do the following:
Specify the computer FQDN of the first pool member, and then click Add.
Repeat the previous step for each computer that you want to add. When you are finished, click Next.
In the Define the file share dialog box, do one of the following:
To use an existing file share, click Use a previously defined file share, select a file share from the list, and then click Next.
To create a new file share, click Define a new file share, type the FQDN for the location of the file share in File Server FQDN, type the name of the share in File Share, and then click Next.
Important
The file share that you specify or create in this step must exist or be created prior to publishing the topology.
The file share assigned to a Director is not actually used, so you can assign the file share of any pool in the organization.In the Specify the Web Services URL dialog box, in External Base URL, specify the FQDN for the Directors, and then click Finish.
Important
The name must be resolvable from Internet DNS servers and point to the public IP address of the reverse proxy, which listens for HTTP/HTTPS requests sent to that URL and proxies them to the external Web Services virtual directory on that Director pool.
Publish the topology.