Topic Last Modified: 2011-04-11

The Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Planning Tool is designed to export to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Visio, and Topology Builder. While these are not required for the operation of the Planning Tool, they do add significant value to the deployment and documentation of your design.

Optional Software

Microsoft Excel

Exporting your design to Microsoft Excel creates a report that displays four tabs in the spreadsheet:

  • Summary – Displays information on site configuration, including user count, capacity settings, virtualized roles, and server profile information.

  • Hardware Profile – Displays a report on the recommended hardware configurations for servers that are specified in the topology, including CPU, memory, disk, and network interface. Also included is the quantity and recommended specifications for the server components. Each server is also defined by site to provide a complete representation of server requirements by site.

  • Ports Requirements – Displays a report of all ports that are enabled, and the association to DNS load balancing (DNS LB) and hardware load balancers (HLB). This report should be used to plan your firewall and DNS LB and HLB configurations.

  • Virtual Machine Profile – Displays a report of the virtualization requirements for server roles that will be included in a virtual machine configuration. Included on this report is the recommended number of cores and memory that should be dedicated per server role.

Microsoft Visio

Exporting your design to Microsoft Visio creates a diagram for use in your documentation purposes of your configured topology and infrastructure. The imported diagram can be edited and rearranged to meet your documentation needs. The typical Visio diagram will include:

  • Global Topology – Diagram of configured Lync Server 2010 sites.

  • Site Name tab – Displays the site configuration topology with Edge, firewall, public switched telephone network (PSTN) with gateways, and the internal server deployment. Internal deployment consists of configured servers and pools, including the Front End pools, SQL Server-based servers, Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), Directors, Mediation Servers, A/V Conferencing Servers, Exchange Unified Messaging (UM) servers, and Monitoring and Archiving Servers.

  • Edge Network Diagram – Diagram detailing the Edge Server configuration with associated IP addresses and fully qualified domain names (FQDNs). DNS load balancing and hardware load balancers are also included. Additionally, Directors and the Front End Server or Front End pool is displayed, with associated DNS LB or HLB and the assigned IP address and FQDN.

  • Site Gateway Pool – Displays the gateways that have been configured for your deployment.



    Note:
    If your design is large enough to require more than four Front End Servers, an additional page will be created for the Front End pool, Front End Servers, SQL Server, IP addresses, and FQDNs.

Lync Server 2010 Topology Builder

Topology Builder is required to use the exported topology from the Planning Tool to publish and deploy the server roles in Lync Server 2010. Topology Builder must be installed in your Lync Server 2010 infrastructure, and can reside on the same computer as the Planning Tool, or can be on another computer. The only requirement is that the exported topology from the Planning Tool must be made available for import by Topology Builder.

The details of how to import the topology exported by the Planning Tool into Topology Builder, and how to make it ready for publishing and deployment is covered in the topics starting with Preparing to use Topology Builder.