Storage Requirements

The actual space consumed by Lync virtual machines varies by role and by business requirements. Typically, 72GB free space is recommended. Lync Back-End database servers hosting a Monitoring or Archiving database are going to consume much more space than a Front End or Edge Server.

Both direct attached storage (DAS) and SAN disks are supported to hold Lync virtual machines. Which option is used depends greatly on the infrastructure that an organization already has in place. SAN provisioning is generally more flexible, but there is a significant upfront cost to these types of systems. DAS storage can be more affordable and yield acceptable performance for virtual machines. Because Lync Server 2013 now uses SQL Mirroring on the backend rather than SQL clustering, there is no shared storage requirement for the backend SQL.

Another consideration for organizations is whether to use a single RAID volume for all virtual machines or to separate each virtual machine disk onto its own physical hard disk. There is no requirement for separate disk spindles, but the best performance is realized if each virtual machine disk can be placed on a dedicated hard disk spindle. The downside to dedicated disks is that unless the disk count is doubled, there is no redundancy at the physical disk level. Many organizations find that placing virtual hard disks on a RAID 1+0 or RAID 5 volume meets the disk requirements of most virtual machines.

Storage I/O performance will be key for virtual hosts. Consider the server roles you have and their combined I/O requirements. The general rule of thumb is that the more spindles there are, and the faster the disks, the better.