Best Practices

The following are best practices from this chapter:

• Use a supported hypervisor for Lync Server 2013 virtual machines such as Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V or VMware vSphere 5.0.

• Use Windows Server 2012 as the guest operating system for any Lync Server 2013 virtual machine.

• Allocate dedicated cores, memory, and physical network adapter(s) for each Lync Server virtual machine.

• Stress test the virtual environment and monitor the Lync performance counters before placing the system in production.

• Do not use Live Migration or vMotion/DRS for Lync Server virtual machines.

• Use the VMQ feature if available.

• Use Single-Root I/O Virtualization if available.

• Continue to monitor performance when in production.