Topology Design
Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.
Topic Last Modified: 2013-06-26
Your topology design should be based on the following:
Global Topology. If your organization has more than one site that requires IM, presence, and conferencing, as well as any additional features and functionality, such as chat rooms and telephony, your global topology should include all sites in your organization that require Office Communications Server 2007 R2 features and functionality. You can deploy Office Communications Server at multiple sites. Identify each site where you want to deploy Office Communications Server 2007 R2. Each site at which Office Communications Server is deployed locally is considered a central site for planning purposes. Users at sites where Office Communications Server 2007 R2 is not deployed can access Office Communications Server 2007 R2 as remote users of a site where an Enterprise pool or Standard Edition server is deployed.
Deployment of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 at remote sites is recommended at each remote site where you have more than 100 users and the remote site is connected by a wide area network (WAN) to your central site or data center.
Site Topology. At each local site, you can deploy either of the following:
Office Communications Server Enterprise Edition in a consolidated configuration. This topology is recommended for most organizations of any size. It provides performance, high availability, and scalability. For details, see Enterprise Edition Consolidated Topology.
Office Communications Server Standard Edition. This topology is for small or midsize deployments, such as branch and pilot deployments that do not have high availability and performance requirements. For details, see Standard Edition Topology.
For details about Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition topologies, including a diagram of the reference topology for Office Communications Server 2007 R2, see Supported Topologies.
For details about the number of users supported by Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition topologies, see Capacity Planning.
For details about the component requirements for Office Communications Server 2007 R2, see Features and Components.
Your scaling, availability, and fault tolerance requirements may require deployment of additional components at a site. For details about components required to support the performance, availability, and fault tolerance your organization needs, including details about the support provided by Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition, see Performance, Availability, and Fault Tolerance Requirements.
At each site where you deploy Office Communications Server 2007 R2, you can also deploy support for external users by deploying Edge Servers at that site or by using the Edge Servers of another site. If you plan to support external access to Web conferences, audio/video conferences, and application sharing at a site and you expect a high amount of usage in the site, deploying a local Consolidated Edge Server is recommended because of the higher bandwidth requirements for this type of traffic. For details, see Planning for External User Access.