Just to recap, the SBA is an appliance preinstalled with Lync Registrar, Mediation Server and PSTN gateway that provides survivable telephony services to branch users in the event of a WAN outage between the branch and the main data centre hosting the Lync servers. Part 1 of this article provides a walk-thru of the steps for deploying and SBA in a Lync 2013 environment. Part 2 will focus on gathering some test results of SBA failover/failback times as well as telephony performance when used with and without Response Groups. The SBA used for this lab test is the Audiocodes Mediant800 SBA and the phones used are a Polycom CX600 Lync Phone Edition and Polycom VVX600 Lync-Compatible phone handsets. Steps to deploy an SBA are well documented in both TechNet as well as in Audiocodes' installation manual and therefore will not be repeated in detail here. The main focus of this article would be the highlights of this specific lab deployment as well as the test results of the telephony performance. The SE Lync FE server role is virtualized with Hyper-V with 4 Virtual CPU's and 4GB memory.
Upgrading Audiocodes SBA to Lync 2013
The Mediant800 used for this article was originally built for a Lync 2010 SBA and thus has to be upgraded to Lync 2013 for this deployment. The upgrade method used in this lab was the USB Upgrade and Recovery procedure. This is a straightforward process and the default settings on the RecoveryUtil.ini file on the USB stick can be used. Obtain the new Lync2013-based .wim image file from Audiocodes and copy it to the USB stick. Then plug the USB stick to the USB port at the back of the Mediant800 and power up. The system should boot from the USB and start the imaging process automatically. Once imaging is complete remove the USB and allow the system to reboot.
The Mediant800 used for this article was originally built for a Lync 2010 SBA and thus has to be upgraded to Lync 2013 for this deployment. The upgrade method used in this lab was the USB Upgrade and Recovery procedure. This is a straightforward process and the default settings on the RecoveryUtil.ini file on the USB stick can be used. Obtain the new Lync2013-based .wim image file from Audiocodes and copy it to the USB stick. Then plug the USB stick to the USB port at the back of the Mediant800 and power up. The system should boot from the USB and start the imaging process automatically. Once imaging is complete remove the USB and allow the system to reboot.
Configuring AD and Lync Server for SBA deployment
The SBA must first be added into AD as a computer object using the AD
Users and Computers tool. In this lab our computer object settings are as shown
on the right. The Default Admins group is chosen as per default since we are working with the Domain Admin account. Next the computer object must be added as a member of the RTCUniversalReadOnlyAdmins group. Next, we use ADSIEdit to edit the properties of the computer object and set the attribute servicePrincipalName to "HOST/<SBA FQDN> as shown below. Finally we create a new user account belonging to the RTCUniversalSBATechnicians group for performing the Survivable Branch Appliance deployment.
The SBA must first be added into AD as a computer object using the AD
Users and Computers tool. In this lab our computer object settings are as shown
on the right. The Default Admins group is chosen as per default since we are working with the Domain Admin account. Next the computer object must be added as a member of the RTCUniversalReadOnlyAdmins group. Next, we use ADSIEdit to edit the properties of the computer object and set the attribute servicePrincipalName to "HOST/<SBA FQDN> as shown below. Finally we create a new user account belonging to the RTCUniversalSBATechnicians group for performing the Survivable Branch Appliance deployment.
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