Planning Your Archiving Topology

In Lync Server 2013, archiving consists of two components:

• Unified Data Collection Agents—These agents are automatically installed on every Front End pool and Standard Edition server. The agent captures messages for archiving and sends them to a local filestore and to the Archiving database.

• Archiving Server Backend Database—This is the SQL server that stores the archived messages. This database must be on a dedicated instance and is recommended to be on a dedicated server in larger deployments.

There are some common requirements that should be planned. In addition to the normal requirements for Lync Server 2013 in terms of supported versions of Windows, also ensure that a valid version of SQL is used. The Archiving Server is compatible with the following versions of SQL:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise

• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard

• Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise

• Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Standard

From a scaling perspective, the Archiving Server will easily support all the users supported by the Front End Servers it is running on.

Based on the typical Lync Server 2013 user model, anticipate around 100KB of data per day per user. Based on this, database sizing can be approximated as the following:

DB size = (DB growth per day per user) × (number of users) × (number of days)

For example, with a deployment to 10,000 users that will archive data for 60 days, anticipated database size is the following for a DB size of 60GB:

DB size = (100KB) × (10,000) × (60)

If an organization varies significantly from the average Lync user model, adjust the growth estimate accordingly.