I'm going to migrate my existing Office Communications Server 2007 Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition, but I confused that the difference between Expanded and Consolidated Topology. As I know, Consolidated Topology is able to install all roles into one Front-End Server, and Expanded Topology is able to install different roles on several Front-End Servers. My question is, If I choose to install the Front-End Server with Consolidated configuration, can I change to Expaneded configuratio in the future? Do I need to reinstall everything to become a Expanded configuration?
Sorry .. one more question, how's the load balancing works if I have two Front-End Servers with Consolidated configuration with a load balancer? Does the clients can resume the connection automatically if one of the Front-End Server down?
If you start with a pair of Enterprise consolidated servers you can add additional hardware later and then deploy additional roles in an Expanded configuraiton to them, e.g. A/V Conferencing. You can then deactivate the unwanted roles on the original FE servers to end up with separate expanded groups hosting pairs of dedicated roles.
And when using a hardware load-balancer the connections are node specific, so if a server fails users will need to reconnect manaully as connections across the offline node will not automatically fail over.Jeff Schertz, PointBridge | MVP | MCITP: Enterprise Messaging | MCTS: OCS
Marked as answer byAiyaThomasWednesday, March 11, 2009 6:29 AM
