Using Lync phones with voice VLAN and dot1x

In a recent project I have been working on voice VLAN implementation and 802.1x (or dot1x) authentication in our Cisco switching infrastructure. There was little to nothing on the subject to be found online, so I thought I would share my experiences.

Topology publishing fails because Trusted Server and FQDN already exists for a different TLS target

When upgrading our Lync infrastructure from 2010 to 2013 I encountered some errors upon the first time I would publish the Lync Server 2013 Enterprise pool, consisting of three Front End servers and a fresh SQL server instance.

Diving into the resulting log file can quickly lead you to think that almost everything failed, as every parent category of the action point that actually went wrong will also be labeled “Completed with errors” or “Failed”. Therefore it is important that you (for your own mental well-being) filter out those things and drill down to the action point that is causing the problem, often with the “Execution result” column simply indicating “Error”.

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Monitoring your Lync Peak Call Capacity

Both SIP and ISDN trunk providers will often bill you based on the number of simultaneous calls/channels they provide (as well as minute charges). As a result you may end up scaling your capacity above what your real needs might be, just to be on the safe side.

With Lync there is no available tool to monitor this, neither real-time nor historically. There used to be a cool script available by Tom Pacyk to do this, but the times this need has arisen over the last year I have only been faced by an error message stating that the resource is not available.

The call performance counters reside on the Mediation server and are by no means a secret, but I haven’t seen anyone else (beside Tom) provide something to output them.

That aside; I decided to make my own PowerShell script to this.
It is still maturing, but for now it will give you

• Console output with the current total of inbound, outbound and concurrent calls (sampled every 15 seconds)
• CSV file output with hourly peak and average (per 15 seconds) statistics on the same counters

I will continue to develop it into a more complete solution, as I see fit. If you have suggestions or comments on the topic they are more than welcome! Although, I have to admit that my PowerShell skills are not unlimited, I promise to give it my best effort!

DISCLAIMER: As I just began working for a new employer where I have not yet got the chance to upgrade our Lync platform to server 2013, I can only vouch for it working on Lync Server 2010 – but I cannot see any reason why it should not run on the 2013 version (the counters would be identical, I think). In any case it will have to be run on the server hosting the Mediation role.

Download the latest version of the script from here.

Cheers!

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Release history:

April 15 2014 – v0.5 – first basic version, dumping hourly statistics to CSV file (max/avg in/out/concurrent calls)
April 16 2014 – v0.8 – added console output with current counters, added keyboard input to exit script

Lync 2013 dual homed collocated Mediation server – the solution

This blog post is all about how to go about setting up a collocated Lync Server Mediation server with separate NIC’s for Primary (or Lync if you will) and PSTN traffic. I wrote it due to the fact that I find this setup poorly documented, and hopefully others will escape the pitfalls that I encountered by reading it.

If you stumbled upon this post directly you might also find the previous one describing the problem in more detail interesting. If not, or if you are more into just fixing problems, then please keep reading.

Lync 2013 dual homed collocated Mediation server – the problem

First of all apologies for the rather long title, but I felt the need to state the full scenario in one sentence.

I have been struggling a little with this scenario for a while, and although it is briefly described as a supported and “no-brainer” setup in the TechNet documentation you come across it proved much harder than I first anticipated when recommending this design for a small sized customer. It also struck me, in regards to the previous reference to TechNet, how poorly documented this actually is – and inspired me to shed a little light to this dark corner of Lync Server installation.

As this post, as usual, turned out to be longer than I wanted it to be I decided to break it into two: This one being sort of the background or explanation, the next one will elaborate on the how-to’s.

Happy reading!

Redirecting inbound PSTN calls in Lync

Have you ever had the need to redirect inbound phone calls to Lync to another destination, maybe even residing outside of Lync? If so; have you ever struggled getting it working?

Either case, this post may be of interest to you; to understand why, how and what to look for if it isn’t working.

Lync client codecs

I have been missing this sort of overview on the Lync Clients for a while, somewhere to get a summary on the different protocols and resolutions/bandwidths of the different Lync Clients. TechNet and other sources I’ve come across are only showing some parts on the subject.

So ultimately I put together this “Matrix”, although not complete. As you can see I lack the info on what kind of voice proto’s being used for Lync:Mac 2011. I do not suspect that this is different from the Lync 2010 Client for Windows (since these are communicating) – but I cannot prove it.

Here is the summary I’ve been able to do this far:

Some remarks from the table are
*1: If Your Android Device supports the Qualcomm 8×60, send rate is 640×480@15fps
*2: Windows Mobile Devices will support hardware offloading on transcoding

Lync Server 2013 mobility – revisited

I wrote up a post on this topic a few months ago, named “Lync 2013 Mobile Client deployment – field notes“.

This has somewhat proven to be one of the more popular posts on my blog, both regarding stats and comments/questions. I have promised to update it to reflect some more recent experience and knowledge on the subject, but haven’t had the time until now (vacation time) to do so. But finally, here goes.

Lync Phone Edition deployment – notes from the field

Lync Phone Deployment is pretty straight forward, and the mystery of DHCP options is pretty well documented on both Technet article and in Jeff Schertz’s excellent blog post on the matter. I have done a few of them, and they have all gone smoothly. Yet, a recent deployment really had me “rolling up my sleeves” to get it working. Here are some of my experiences, and what to look out for when setting it up.

Edge server not replicating

On a recent job, I was aiding a customer setting up a new Lync Server 2013 Edge. It was a mixed topology, with a Lync Server 2010 Front End still acting as Central Management Server, but all users moved to the Lync Server 2013 pool and the new Edge destined to handle external media relay.

Upon the install completion and successfully starting services we noticed that the edge server did not replicate with the CMS.