Planning Your Conferencing Topology

Conferencing can be deployed in either the Standard Edition of Lync Server 2013 or the Enterprise Edition. New to Lync Server 2013 is that the AV Conferencing role can no longer be split out onto dedicated servers. Due to optimizations in the Microsoft MCUs, scalability is greatly improved, thus removing the need to use dedicated AV Conferencing servers even in large environments. The hardware requirements are the same as noted previously, even now that the AV Conferencing role is collocated with the Front End role.

Note that a new server role is required for conferencing, called the Office Web Apps Server. Although this server is not explicitly part of Lync, Lync Web Conferencing does have a dependency on it. A detailed description of the Office Web Apps Server is covered in Chapter 11, “Dependent Services and SQL.”