Topic Last Modified: 2011-01-20

If you have Front End pools, Director pools, or Edge Server pools that include multiple computers, you need to deploy load balancing for these pools. Load balancing distributes the traffic among the servers in the pools.

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 supports two load balancing solutions: DNS load balancing and hardware load balancing. You can choose different load balancing solutions for each pool in your deployment.

DNS load balancing offers several advantages including simpler administration, more efficient troubleshooting, and the ability to isolate much of your Lync Server traffic from any potential hardware load balancer problems.

Note that if you choose to use DNS load balancing, you still need to implement hardware load balancers for some types of traffic, such as HTTP traffic. However, the administration of these hardware load balancers is greatly simplified. For details, see DNS Load Balancing.