LYNC 2010 with Multiple Sites and Pools

Question

We have LYNC 2010 Enterprise Pool in North America with 5 Front End servers, 2 Edge Servers. No Director servers deployed. We want to enable Dial-In Conferencing feature for all users across the Globe (to avoid 3^rd party conferencing
cost…) and proposing 2 additional pools ( one in EMEA and another in APAC regions). I am looking for best practices to deploy multiple pools on multiple central sites.
Do we need to deploy Director Servers? (Microsoft recommend Director, however is this mandatory for multiple pools?)
How can we handle Simple URLs and DNS entries in multiple Edge pools (edge pool in each frontend pool)?
Do we need to publish different ISA firewall rules for simple URLs and mobility?
As we are not planning to replace PBX now, and only looking to provide dial-in Conferencing Bridge with SIP trunking, what is the best practice to provide site resilience in case one central site is down?
Thanks in advance for your help…
Tek-Nerd

Answer 1

Hello.
1. This is a recommendation and it's not mandatory even with multiples pools. The only point if you don't deploy director is that for the first connection, all sig wil go through one pool (the one behind the srv and dns record) and after this pool redirect
the user to the good one (and also do the authentification) .Also director is made to avoid this type of load on one pool (connection from other pool and from edge authentification), but still not mandatory.
2.Simple URL point only on one entry (or pool of RP) somewhere in the world (after there are some unofficial workaround) but don't forget that behind that there is the external web service URL (for each pool) and also an edge association to one pool. And
the user is really using thoses URL and svc (edge associated to the pool as the ext web url)
For the external web svc & edge association, you can create a local edge pool closer to your internal pool so for those user the media will be closer and don't go trhough the world. (exemple you add one emea pool, the media that come from internet goes
through the emea edge and emea RP handling Lync external web services). But the simple urls still point to your main edge/RP pool.
3. Like point before, not mandatory, recommendation if you don't want your media going around the world and coming back. Be carefull the association is still fixed (depending of the user's pool parameter), so if the user travel still using original edge/rp
settings.
4. You can create multiple trunk with lync so have backup in case of one is no more working. After this is hard to say what is the best, this is depending of your infrastructure.
David