OCS / LCS

One of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of publishing OCS - the use of hardware load balancers. Thankfully there is a brand new document from Microsoft to help you out.

To quote the download page:
"This document explains infrastructure and system requirements for hardware load balancing of Office Communications Server Enterprise pools, Edge Server arrays, and Communicator Web Access. It also explains various networking concepts, such as one arm vs. two arm configurations, network address translation (NAT), VLAN tagging, and Mutual Transport Layer Security (MTLS) connection multiplexing, in the context of an Office Communications Server deployment."

Grab the document here.

It turns out that a little while ago I had discovered part of the puzzle to getting OCS 2007 R2 working on Windows 2008 R2. Strangely, a somewhat related blog entry I made around the same time was the other piece of the puzzle.

Namely, for 2008 R2 support, you need a Server 2008 R2 specific hotfix (KB 975858) and modify a few NTLM security settings that differ as defaults on Server 2008 R2 compared to Server 2008 R1.

Ideally, if you can support it in your environment, I would configure your servers and clients to be the most secure by default with use of a GPO or registry setting. That way, you are using the latest NTLM protocol with 128-bit encryption.

In the screenshot below, it shows the security setup on my laptop for client security:


Keep in mind, it is best to match these settings on the client side and server side.
If you configure the client side and do not configure the server side, you will still be able to connect.
If you configure the server side, and leave the client side at defaults, depending on the OS release, connection problems may happen due to the mismatch.

You can also read the official Microsoft guidance on Server 2008 R2 and OCS 2007 R2 here and here.

Update: I've discovered some additional issues that can be worked around. I have documented them in a new entry here.

You can file this one under 'Things you find while browsing recently posted downloads'.

Since this has been posted for download on Microsoft's download site, you know that a public beta for the OCS release can only be right around the corner.

It won't be useful yet, because this will be used for the LiveMeeting functionality of the upcoming OCS version. Interesting to see it posted already though.

You can check it out here.

The big news with this release is support for Windows 2008 R2 and workarounds for specific VOIP inter-op scenarios. I will be publishing some more info on both of these items later but wanted to get the word out because this update has been a long time coming!

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 CU5 Update
Office Communications Server 2007 R2 CU5 Database Update
Office Communicator 2007 R2 CU5 Update
Office Communicator Phone Edition 2007 R2 CU5 Update
Office Communicator Attendant Console 2007 R2 CU5 Update