Lync Mobility and Front-end services
This is more of a PSA entry than anything else. It was recently brought to my attention that the supported topologies for Microsoft Lync have changed slightly.
When Microsoft Lync was first released, one of the great things was that we could co-locate the Mediation service on the Front-end. This makes a lot of sense in smaller organizations who may not have a lot of PSTN calls. A lot of times, we see people dual-home the front end server so that the mediation component will utilize its own NIC. What’s wrong with that you say? Well, nothing, until…
Lync Mobility. Microsoft updated the Topologies and Components for Mobility Technet article on 12/18/2012 to reflect the following statement (Note: it is the very last statement on the page):
“The Mobility Service is not supported on dual-homed Front End Servers that are collocated with the Mediation Server role.”
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh690037.aspx
After asking around, it seems that this is a bug with how Lync selects the IP address for RTC and that a fix will hopefully come a future update. For now, if you want to have the Mediation service co-located on the Front-end server, you can only have a single NIC.
Adam Ball, PEI
