Lync not enterprise-ready, claims Microsoft ISV-turned-rival

20.09.2011

But there's another catch, too. For such large-scale deployments, Lync Enterprise Edition "requires the use of load balancers," a Microsoft spokeserpon says. "Enterprise Edition Servers are deployed in 'pools' which support up to 10,000 users per server and 80,000 users per pool." (Reference .)

Plus, Microsoft recommends that Exchange be run on its own servers, too.

For the SMB, Microsoft says the Standard Edition supports up to 5,000 users. It also says that the Standard Edition supports failover, contrary to popular belief that it doesn't. "This is new with Lync: users fail-over from one Standard Edition Server to a second and failover does not require load balancers."

Morimoto points out that these support numbers don't tell the whole story for telephony services, either. The configuration is really dependent on how many users can be expected to be on the phone concurrently. Morimoto will confidently put 5,000 users on a single Lync Instant Messaging server and 2,000 people on a single Web conferencing server.

For telephony, he says he typically figures on one server for every 100 concurrent users. On average, Morimoto estimates that for many companies, about 10% of the employees are on the phone at any given time, meaning one server can likely handle 1,000 users. Ergo, a company with 5,000 people, would likely need five servers. On the other hand, with , this doesn't necessarily mean purchasing a lot of new hardware. "A company with that many people is going to be in three or four buildings. So you will probably have a server in every building anyway," he describes.