Lync 2013 Complete Lab Guide Using Single Public IP Address – Part 1 – Setting Up the Lab

The following guides will walk you through setting up a complete, fully functional Lync 2013 Standard Edition deployment complete with Enterprise Voice, Remote Access, Mobility and Exchange Integration. Before we embark on this it is important to understand that this is for Lab purposes only and should not be used in any production deployment.

At times this guide will deviate from Microsoft Best Practices in order to achieve the end goal of emulating a deployment in the real world. I think it is a good idea to outline these now before we start so that you are aware

Guide Liberties

• We will be using only 1 public IP address instead of the minimum recommended of 2 for the simple reason, I only have one
• We will be installing the Lync Edge Server in the same LAN segment as the front end server because my lab kit does not support multiple network segments
• We will be using non standard ports for some services in order to achieve a fully featured environment
• We will be using our own Certificates from the Internal CA for external access because I am not spending money on proper certificates in a Lab

To begin this Lab, lets start with the basic requirements

Physical Server Requirements

In order to create the servers required for Lync we will use the Hyper-V role of Microsoft Windows Server 2012 to facilitate this.

Hyper-V Installation

This guide will not cover the exact steps to install Hyper-V but you should add the role and accept the defaults unless you know what you are doing. Once Hyper-V is installed you should configure a Hyper-V virtual switch that has access to your LAN.

Virtual Machines

The following Virtual Machines will need to be created. Replace the IP addresses with the IP range of your LAN

Build each of the virtual machines to the base Operating Systems shown.

Firewall Requirements (NAT)

While these virtual machines are building you can get your firewall NAT translation rules ready. You will need these for providing external access to your Lync Lab

Public DNS Requirements

You will need an external domain name to use if you want external access. For simple reasons this will form the name of our Active Directory Domain Name to make certificates a little easier to generate. Lync requires a number of DNS records for its services to be published to the external DNS zone of your domain name. As these changes can take upwards of 24 hours to propagate it is best these get changed now before the Lab is ready. This way you get to test immediately when your lab is ready.

Once you have these in your external DNS you have satisfied the external networking requirements for Lync.

Download Supporting Software

You will need the following Software Downloaded to a file share in addition to the Operating Systems

This completes Part 1 of the Lab. In this part we should have completed the setup of the Hyper-V server, created all virtual machines and installed the required operating systems in preparation for the configuration. We should have also created all the firewall access rules and port forwards as well as setting up the external DNS zone of you domain. In Part 2 we will setup the pre-requisites needed for Lync including domain, certificate services, exchange, reverse proxy and office web apps

Mark Vale

Mark is an Independent Microsoft Teams Consultant with over 15 years experience in Microsoft Technology. Mark is the founder of Commsverse, a dedicated Microsoft Teams conference and former MVP. You can follow him on twitter @UnifiedVale

www.valeconsulting.co.uk