Designing a Resilient Microsoft Unified Communications Environment

Tony Bradley — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:56:59 +0000

As organizations move to unified communications it becomes imperative that disaster recovery and business continuity be incorporated into the design and implementation. In the event that a natural disaster or other catastrophe strike the primary data center, there needs to be a fall-back plan in place to ensure that the business can continue to communicate and work productively.

The ability to provide some sort of failover redundancy or site resiliency has been seen as an Achilles heel of Microsoft Office Communications Server. Microsoft has made some enhancements though in R2 and produced a white paper describing how to accomplish site resiliency with Microsoft OCS 2007 R2.

Here is the description Microsoft provides for the white paper:

This white paper describes a site resiliency solution for Office Communications Server 2007 R2. The solution includes an Enterprise pool that spans two geographically separate sites. The solution provides a failover mechanism between the two sites to ensure that Office Communications Server functionality such as instant messaging, presence, and conferencing remains available even if one of the sites becomes unavailable.

This white paper is divided into three main sections:

The Solution section provides an overview of the tested and supported site resiliency solution described in this paper.
The Test Methodology section describes the testing topology, expected behavior, and test results.
The Findings and Recommendations section provides practical guidance for deploying your own failover solution.

To successfully follow this paper, you should have a thorough understanding of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering.

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Designing a Resilient Microsoft Unified Communications Environment