Solution validation testing with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Cisco ACE and FWSM products yielded interesting insights about the details of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 operation and how Cisco ACE and FWSM can be configured to support Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Enterprise Edition in both consolidated and expanded mode deployments.
The Cisco ACE configuration required to support Office Communications Server 2007 is not complicated and can be easily deployed.
•Layer 3 Virtual IP (VIP) can be used to simplify load balancing configuration. Office Communications Server 2007 uses many different protocols to support various features of the product. The hardware load balancer configuration can be simplified by configuring the virtual IP address on the load balancer to listen on all IP ports and utilize Access Control Lists (ACLs) to restrict traffic to the VIP.
•The ACE Source Network Access Translation (SNAT) feature for server-initiated connections can be used to simplify Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 deployments and traffic analysis. For simplicity, Microsoft recommends using source NAT for all pool traffic; however, further Cisco and Microsoft testing found it is only necessary to use source NAT for server-initiated traffic destined for VIP, thus saving resources. Cisco ACE supports this type of SNAT, which dramatically decreases the size of the NAT translation table and preserves source IP addresses of external client connections, which can be useful in troubleshooting and log file analysis.
Functional and performance testing with Cisco ACE in a Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 consolidated deployment provides application availability and scalability:
•22,000 concurrent IM users can be supported by two dual-core Xeon-based servers with 2 GB RAM.
•Tests running a mix of instant messaging and conferencing traffic generate up to 45 Mbps of traffic.
•High availability failover scenarios have minimal impact on application operation to end users.
Get it all here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Verticals/ansmsocs.pdf
