Jeff Goldner is back with part five of our CPS workload deployment series. As for earlier posts in this series, this information applies to all clouds using Windows Azure Pack. Jeff is a Principal Program Manager in Microsoft’s Cloud Solutions Group.
Hi, this is Jeff Goldner again from Microsoft’s Cloud Solutions team. This time, we are introducing our sample artifacts and Gallery item for Skype for Business 2015, brought to you by the CPS team, with a lot of help from the Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Group’s Customer Architecture and Technologies (CAT) Team. While we were developing the Lync artifacts, Skype for Business was introduced. So we decided to switch to bring you the latest technology available for collaboration and conferencing. As always, this is provided as a sample for helping you deploy the workload and we do expect that you will want to modify it to best suit your or your customers’ needs.
By now you are probably familiar with our approach of using Service Management Automation (SMA) for configuring fabric resources, like VMs, and Desired State Configuration (DSC) to automate the installation of the workloads themselves. And again, we fixed some more bugs in the artifacts supporting the other Microsoft workloads, so make sure you update all of your existing plans if you used the previous VM Roles.
While CPS is not a pre-requisite, it is only fair to warn you that some assumptions have been made in the runbooks that won’t necessarily apply to non-CPS Windows Azure Pack(WAP) deployments.
As with the earlier releases, we are making these available through the VMM content feed.
Previous blogs in this series
Part 1- SQL 2014 and AD. (We updated the instructions included in this release to refer to SQL 2014 SP1)
Part 2- Exchange 2013 SP1 (updated instructions for CU 9)
Part 3– SharePoint 2013 SP1
Part 4– Remote Desktop Sessions (RDS-H) using Windows Server 2012 R2 built-in roles
What the deployment does
As with most Microsoft first-party workloads, there are numerous ways to deploy Skye for Business servers. Rather than go for a full Enterprise variant, we opted to use the Standard Edition which suits our targeted tenant size of about 1,000 users with suitable high availability support.
And as with all of the above examples, we use the event that is fired when a tenant subscribes to a plan to trigger a set of VM roles. (See the resources at the end, particularly the videofrom TechEd Europe 2014.)
Here’s what our Skype for Business installation is going to look like after we finish the deployment:
Figure 1 Dedicated Skype for Business plan
Subscribing to the Dedicated plan will result in the following activities:
- A VM network is created using our software defined networking capability
- A new AD domain is set up with two DCs, including DNS (and the VM network is configured for that)
- A Skype for Business front-end tier is created with two instances for high availability
- Two front-end servers are configured as shown, with one of them hosting the Central Management Store
- A file server is created for storing content
- The load balancer gets configured against the edge server access points
Please note that the last step requires a fabric administrator to configure the load balancing pool. There are several steps that we can’t automate at this point using VMM or other automation.
What isn’t here
We chose the Standard edition because that will be sufficient for many CPS tenants. You do give up some features for automated failover and high availability compared to the Enterprise edition.
This sample does not integrate with Exchange UM Server or the Office Web Apps server. These components can be added and we hope to have a more integrated version of these gallery resources in the future.
The sample deployment also doesn’t connect to a public telephone network (PSTN) or PBX. You will need specialized hardware for this, but it should be possible to add the necessary services. See the resource section below for more information.
Validation
We ran validation tests against multiple instances of this deployment on an actual CPS rack. For this workload we did not try to max out the traffic or resources in the rack. It is highly recommended that you use the Lync Stress Tool before going into production.
Samples
The usual reminder: these are examples for you (the service provider/enterprise private cloud admin) to customize to best suit your customers’ needs. To modify them will require an understanding of how WAP works, how the multiple scripting engines process scripts, and how to edit the automation artifacts. An understanding of PowerShell is also going to be a prerequisite. See the Building Cloudsblog and the rest of the resources at the end of this post.
Resources
Skype for Business (and Lync)
Skype for Business on TechNet: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg398616.aspx
Stress tool: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj945609%28v=ocs.15%29.aspx
Load Balancer Support: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg615011.aspx
Cloud Platform System
Intro to CPS: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/cloud-platform-system/Overview.aspx
Ignite Sessions:
Overview of the Microsoft Cloud Platform System
Operating the Microsoft Cloud Platform System
Architectural Deep Dive into the Microsoft Cloud Platform System
Deep Dive in the Microsoft Cloud Platform System Networking
Automating Workload Provisioning: SQL, Exchange, SharePoint and RDS on CPS.
Windows Azure Pack
Windows Azure Pack: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/windows-azure-pack/
Web Platform Installer: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx
And the VMM feed: http://www.microsoft.com/web/webpi/partners/servicemodels.xml
WAP Virtual Academy (A whole day of WAP training): http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/windows-azure-pack-infrastructure-as-a-service-jump-start
Hands on Lab: Introduction to Virtual Machine Roles
VM Role Authoring Tool: https://vmroleauthor.codeplex.com/
SMA training: http://aka.ms/MVASMA
Everything you ever wanted to know about automation for the private cloud: http://aka.ms/BuildingClouds
DSC (Getting Started and Advanced)
https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Getting-Started-with-PowerShell-Desired-State-Configuration-DSC
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn249912.aspx