Specifications

18 Reference Architecture | Dell
TM
Unified Communication Solution with Microsoft® Lync® Server 2013 for Single Site
Implementation | Version 1.0
Dynamic and differencing disks are not recommended since guaranteeing optimum performance and
consistent user experience even under peak load is the primary design objective.
3.2.4 Best Practices
In addition to design considerations, certain best practices must also be considered while deploying Lync
Server 2013 on Hyper-V. These best practices are detailed below.
3.2.4.1 Infrastructure Best Practices
In order to have a successful Lync 2013 implementation on Hyper-V, certain recommendations are
provided for the infrastructure, which includes server, CPU, networking, disks and operating system. These
recommendations include:
• Use 64-bit Intel® Xeon® processors for the hosts, with a minimum of two sockets per server. Using
multiple populated sockets allows more cores per server, increasing density and allowing virtualization
to be leveraged.
• Use at least a dual-port network adapter with teaming on 1Gbps. In this deployment, the PowerEdge
R620 hosts for the Lync Standard Edition were deployed with four teamed 1GbE network adapters.
Further details are available in Figure 3.
• Use separate disks for the hypervisor, guest virtual machines and SQL databases. Doing so ensures that
there is no contention for disk access among the three different stores. In addition, it is a Hyper-V best
practice to not store system files on other storage drives.
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If there is a period of high I/O activity in SQL
store, the hypervisor and VM stores will not experience any bottlenecks that will cause sluggishness in
the entire topology, should this best practice be followed. This separation of disks by different LUNs
also allows for easier management.
• Use Windows Server 2012 Datacenter or Standard edition. Although Windows Server 2008 R2 is
supported, the recommendation is to consider Windows Server 2012 in order to take advantage of the
latest features from the operating system and hypervisor.
• Use SQL Server 2012 or SQL Server 2008 R2 for the databases. SQL 2012 was used for lab validation.
• Provision physical hosts with identical hardware configuration in a virtualized environment. In this
reference implementation, PowerEdge R620 hosts with identical hardware and configuration are used
to avoid any degradation in user experience due to performance variations among the VMs on
different hosts. This recommendation is more critical in environments that use Hyper-V failover
clustering, but should be considered in deployments such as the one presented.
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For details, see the article “6 Best Practices for Physical Servers Hosting Hyper-V Roles” in TechNet magazine:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd744830.aspx