Topic Last Modified: 2010-07-18
A Director is a server running Microsoft Communications Server 2010 that authenticates user requests, but does not home any user accounts. Deploying a Director is beneficial in two scenarios:
- If you enable access by external users by deploying Edge
Servers, you should also deploy a Director. The Director will
authenticate the external users, and then pass their traffic on to
internal servers. When a Director is used to authenticate external
users, it relieves Enterprise pool servers from the overhead of
performing authentication of these users. It also helps insulate
internal Front End pools from malicious traffic such as
denial-of-service attacks; if the network is flooded with invalid
external traffic in such an attack, this traffic ends at the
Director, and internal users should not see any effect on
performance.
- If you deploy multiple Front End pools at a central site,
adding a Director to that site will streamline authentication
requests and improve performance; all requests will go first to the
Director, which will then route them to the correct Front End
pool.