In this Part, I will go through the part of the configuration of our Consolidated OCS Edge Server using a separate NIC for each Edge Role.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Consolidated Edge OCS 2007 Server Installation

When installing an OCS Consolidated Edge Server, you would perform the following steps:

Note: Edge Server should not be joined to your Corporate Active Directory.

1. Install Files for Edge Server
2. Activate Edge Server
3. Configure Edge Server
4. Configure Certificates for Edge Server
5. Start Services
6. Validate Edge Server

Install Files for Edge Server (Step 1)

To begin the Edge Server installation process, we can insert our OCS CD (Standard can be used for Edge).  There are some prerequisites for installing OCS such as .Net Framework 2.0, but this is all taken care of during the installation.

Insert the CD and let’s begin the installation process.  You will be asked to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable. Click Yes to Continue.

You will then be asked to install the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. Click Yes to Continue.

Once Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 is installed, you will be presented with the Deployment Wizard.  We will want to deploy our Edge Server in a Consolidated fashion..  Click Deploy Other Server Roles > Deploy Edge Server to Continue.

We are now on Step 1 which is to Install Files for Edge Server. Click Install for Install Files for Edge Server to Continue after meeting the Prerequisites (being a local Administrator).

On the Welcome Screen, Click Next to Continue. After fully reading the License Agreement, if you agree, Select “I accept the terms in the license agreement .”  Click Next to Continue.

You will be asked for Customer Information such as Product Key, Name, and your Organization Name.  Enter them appropriately. Click Next to Continue.

Enter the location you want your files to be installed.  I chose the default location. Click Next to Continue.

You are now ready to start the Installation.

Once you completed the File Installation, you should see the Installation Interface update the Step 1 Status showing as Completed.

Activate Edge Server (Step 2)

Click Run for Active Edge Server to Continue.

On the Welcome Screen, Click Next to Continue.

The next screen asks us what Edge Roles we want to install.  Because we are installing a single Consolidated Edge Server, we will choose all three Edge Roles; Access, Web Conferencing, and Audio/Video. Select Activate Access Edge Server, Web Conferencing Edge Server, A/V Edge Server.  Click Next to Continue.

Note: If you are going to be load balancing, you can only have the Access Edge and Web Conferencing Edge roles together on a server.  You will need to have two separate Audio/Video Servers.  So you will need a minimum of four servers if you plan on load balancing all three Edge Roles.

You will now be prompted to specify passwords for your Service Accounts.  I recommend to use long secure passwords.  You can view this and this site which assist in choosing strong passwords.  You will have to do this for several Service Account: RTCProxyService

Once you have set a password, Click Next to Continue.

You are now ready to Activate your Edge Server.  Review your Current Settings.  After satisfied, Click Next to Continue.

When the Activation is finished, Click Finish.  You will be given the option to view the log which I advise you to do to ensure everything went OK.

Once you completed the Activation, you should see the Installation Interface update the Step 2 Status showing as Completed.

Configure Edge Server (Step 3)

Click Run for Confingure Edge Server to Continue.

On the Welcome Screen, Click Next to Continue.

The next screen asks us if we have a Configuration File to use.  This file is great to use if we are deploying multiple Edge Servers that will be load balanced.  For example, it would be useful if I was going to be deploying two Access Edge/Web Conferenicng Edge Servers behind a Hardware Load Balancer.  I would configure my first Edge Server, and at the end of the configuration, it would ask me to export the configuration so I can import it on my second Edge Server.  Nifty!

Because this is our first and only Edge Server, Click Next to Continue.

We must choose the Internal IP of our Edge Server as well as its’ FQDN.  We are presented with the following options.

You may be wondering which IP to choose.  Remember back in Part 4 we configured four NICs.  One of these NICs was the Internal NIC which we configured as follows. We also configured a dedicated NIC and IP for each Edge Role.  Here is a list of NIC Names, their associated Edge Role, and IPs associated with them

Note: Please don’t forget that in a production environment, or even a real test environment where you will have internet/internal connectivity, the A/V Edge NIC requires a publicly routable IP Address.  This does not mean it is directly exposed to the internet.  You should need to have your firewall route a public IP directly to your A/V Edge Server.

So in our Edge Configuration, we will want to choose 192.168.119.160 for our Internal NIC.  We will also want to set the FQDN as  ocs-ocs2.shudnow.net (computername.domain.com).  Because our server is not a domain member, we will need to manually add the DNS record in our Active Directory DNS due to the nature of Active Directory Secure DNS Zones only allowing domain members to add records to our zone. Click Next to Continue.

We now must configure the IPs and FQDNs for all three Edge Roles.  You can refer to the Excel List above to determine what IPs are associated with which role.

When a client connects to the Access Edge Server, the Access Server will return the URLs needed for the client to successfully communicate with services in the OCS organization.  For example, we will configure our Web Conferencing Edge Server to use webconf.exchange.shudnow.net.  Exchange.shudnow.net is our Internet DNS Zone.  So when a Live Meeting Client tries to connect to a web conference, our Access Edge will communicate with the client telling it the FQDN for the web conferencing edge.  The same applies for the A/V Edge Server.

Enter in the IP Configuration and FQDN accordingly.  Click Next to Continue.

We will want to use this Edge Server to allow anonymous users to join meetings as well as enable federation.  If you plan on allowing your users to talk with public IM providers such as AOL, MSN, and Yahoo, select those features as you see fit.

Now let me explain why Allow remote users to communicate with federated contacts is greyed out.  It is possible to set up two Edge Servers and use one Access Edge for Remote User Access and another for Federation and Public IM connectivity.  If you decide to do this, one one Access Edge you’ll disable Federation which will light up the currently greyed out option.  On the second Access Edge, you’ll disable Remote User Access and enable Federation.  Now keep in mind this is optional.  Because we will be utilizing one Consolidated Edge Server, we can choose the options as follows which will enable Remote User Access, Federation, and Public IM Connectivity through our Consolidated Edge. Click Next to Continue.

We want our Edge Server to be able to talk to the internal OCS Servers.  We have a few options.  If we are using a Standard Server as our next hop, we would enter the Standard Pool FQDN which would be the server’s FQDN.  If we deployed a Director, we would enter the Director (or FQDN of hardware load balancer). Because we deployed an Enterprise Pool, we will use the FQDN of the Enterprise Pool. Enter the Enterprise Pool FQDN OCSPool.shudnow.net. Click Next to Continue.

Because our SIP Domain will be exchange.shudnow.net, that is what we will choose when specifying what our Authorized Internal SIP Domains are.  Click Next to Continue.

We will then want to enter our internal OCS Pool Name for Authorized Internal Servers.  If you have more than one Pool or Standard Edition Server, enter them here.  Click Next to Continue.

You are now ready to Apply your Edge Server Configuration.  Review your Current Settings.  After satisfied, Click Next to Continue.

You are now ready to apply your configuration.  Review your Current Settings.  After satisfied, Click Next to Continue.

When the Configuration is finished, Click Finish.  You will be given the option to view the log which I advise you to do to ensure everything went OK.  This is also where you’ll have the change to export your configuration if you’re deploying a second Edge Server for Hardware Load Balancing.

Once you completed the Configuration, you should see the Installation Interface update the Step 3 Status showing as Completed.

Configure Certificates for Edge Server (Step 4)

Click Run for Configure Certificates for the Edge Server to Continue.

On the Welcome Screen, Click Next to Continue.

I’m going to skip through a lot of this section as it consists of how to obtian a Certificate which I already went through in Part 4 when we discussed configuring our ISA Server.

I will be obtaining three certificates.  One is for our Internal NIC that consists of the FQDN of our Server (ocs-ocs2.shudnow.net).  The second certificate will consist of  the names of our Access/Web external edge roles. The third certificate will be our A/V Authentication certificate.

Now you may be thinking, well, can’t I just use two certificates?  One for internal and A/V edge.  Well in our case, probably.  If you have multiple servers, no.  This is because each certificate for the internal interface will be unique due to the name of every server being different.  The A/V Authentication name will be the same and exported/imported on multiple servers.  Also, Microsoft considers it to be insecure by using the same certificate for both the Internal and A/V Authentication services.

Certificate One (Internal Interface):

CN = ocs-ocs2.shudnow.net

Certificate Two (Access/Web Server Roles):

CN = sip.exchange.shudnow.net

SAN = sip.exchange.shudnow.net

SAN = webconf.exchange.shudnow.net

Certificate Three (A/V Authentication)

SAN = av.exchange.shudnow.net

Now keep in mind the reason the namespaces our different is because the internal NIC is connected to our internal infrastructure and will be utilized internally only.  Because of that, we will be using our internal namespace that is also used as our default SIP routing domain.  Our edge servers will be contacted using the external DNS namespace.  If you are using split-DNS where your internal namespace is hosted on external DNS, you can use either namespace.

For purposes of this lab, I will obtain all certificates from our internal CA.  Because our Edge Server is not a domain member, you have to ensure it contains the Root Certificate from our Internal CA.  You will also have to submit the request, approve it, and submit the .cer file manually and import it manually due to our Edge server not being a domain member.

Note: In a production environment, you will be requesting your Access/Web Conferencing Certificates from a Third Party Vendor.  Both your A/V Authentication and Internal Interface NICs will be provided by your Internal CA.  The A/V Edge role doesn’t need an Internet Facing Certificate.

We will first choose to Create a new Certificate.  One you have done this, you will want to make sure you select only your Edge Server Private Interface.  Click Next to Continue.

You will want to go through the rest of the configuration which includes entering your Organization Name, Company Name, Etc…  As I said, when you are at the screen which consists of what FQDN to use, you will use the CN of ocs-ocs2.shudnow.net.

Once you are finished preparing the request, you will see the Step being partially finished.  Click Run again to Continue.

You will now want to go through the motions of taking the .Cer file you obtained from your Certificate Authority and binding it to your request.

Follow this procedure with the remaining certificates.  Refer to the certificate CN/SAN names above as to what entries should be on your certificate.

Your Access/Web Conferencing Edge Certificate request will look like:

Your A/V Certificate request will look like:

Once you completed the Certificate Configuration, you should see the Installation Interface update the Step 4 Status showing as Completed.

Remaining Steps

I will not be going through the remaining steps.  It consists of Starting Services and Validating your Configuration.

The only remaining steps are to enable users, configure federation, and enable your Front End Servers to talk with your Edge Servers.  All this information is out of the scope of this article.  If you are interested in doing this (and you will have to connect your Front End Servers to your Edge Servers), visit this site here.

Summary

Well folks, that is all for not just Part 5, but the entire article series. Hopefully these articles have helped you understand more on how the deployment of OCS works.  There is a lot more to the configuration of OCS and especially the deployment when you get into load balancing.  Much more than what I went into.  But hopefully the article gave you enough knowledge to know where to look and how the overall deployment process works.

In this Part, I will go through the installation of our Office Communicator 2007 client and get it connected through OCS by configuring DNS. I will then begin preparation of our Edge Servers followed by configuring our ISA 2006 Server.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Front End OCS 2007 Server Installation

When installing OCS in a consolidated Enterprise Edition deployment, you would perform the following steps:

1. Prepare Active Directory (Completed in Part 2)
2. Create an Enterprise Pool (Completed in Part 2)
3. Configure a Load Balancer (Completed in Part 2)
4. Configure Pool / DNS (Partially Completed in Part 3)
5. Add Server to Pool (Completed in Part 3)
6. Configure Certificate (Completed in Part 3)
7. Configure Web Components Server Certificate (Completed in Part 3)
8. Verify Replication (Completed in Part 3)
9. Start Services (Completed in Part 3)
10. Validate Server and Pool Functionality (Partially Completed in Part 3)

Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC) 2007

Installing MOC

Installing MOC is a rather straightforward process.  I won’t go over the installation steps as it is like installing any other application.

Logging onto MOC

In Part 3, we talked about holding off on DNS additions so when we install MOC, we can see what DNS is required to allow our client to log on.  So let’s try logging on with one of the users we created in Part 3.  The user we will log on as is OCS User 1 that has a SIP Address of ocsuser1@exchange.shudnow.net.

When we try to log on, we will get the following error message:

So let’s start adding DNS by entering our DNS MMC by going to Start > Administrative Tools > DNS.  We will then create a host record for our Pool (ocspool.shudnow.net).

Note: If you have multiple Front End Servers and are deploying behind a hardware load balancer, the IP Address in this host file will be pointing to your hardware load balancer.

After that host record has been created, we will need to create an SRV record so MOC clients can find DNS and automatically locate the OCS Front End Server.  But because we are using a separate namespace of exchange.shudnow.net, we will need to create either a new Primary DNS Zone for exchange.shudnow.net or by creating a new domain called exchange within our shudnow.net zone.  I elected to create an entire new zone.

Once your exchange.shudnow.net zone is created, we will then need to create a host record inside our new exchange.shudnow.net zone for sip.exchange.shudnow.net.

Create an SRV record within the exchange.shudnow.net zone that contains the following information.

Note: Internal clients can connect using either TLS or TCP while external clients can only connect to TLS.  If you want to allow your clients to connect to TCP, change the above to _SipInternal and change the port to 5060.

So let me explain what is going on here.  We created our DNS Pool record in our shudnow.net zone.  OCSPool.shudnow.net points to 192.168.119.151 which is the IP Address of our Front End Server.  Because our users are SIP Enabled for exchange.shudnow.net, we needed to create a new zone.  Typically, if you would have SIP enabled them for shudnow.net, we would just create our OCSPool A Record, and then create the SRV record to point to OCSpool.shudnow.net.

If you recall, when we retreived our certificate, it had DNS names of OCSpool.shudnow.net and sip.exchange.shudnow.net.  Because SRV records have to point to a DNS name within its own domain, we created our sip.exchange.shudnow.net A record within the exchange.shudnow.net zone.  We then created the DNS SRV record for automatic client logon to point to the sip.exchange.shudnow.net name which is a name in our certificate request.

So essentially the following happens in order:

1. Client logs on using automatic logon
2. Client looks for an SRV record for _sipinternaltls._tcp.SIPDomain (in our case _sipinternaltls._tcp.exchange.shudnow.net)
3. DNS Server successfully returns sip.exchange.shudnow.net as the service from the SRV record
4. Client connects to sip.exchange.shudnow.net and resolves that to 192.168.119.151
5. Client is successfully enable to start communications with the Front End Server

Adding Distribution Groups to MOC

I have created a universal distribution group named Sales.  Our Sales distribution group was created within Exchange. A user named Simo notified me that a distribution group doesn’t necessarily have to be created within Exchange.  As long as the distribution group has the e-mail attribute filled in, OCS expansion will function.

Searching for Sales, we will see that it will display our Sales group.  We can add this group to our contacts list and we can expand the group information.

Your Communicator client will refresh the membership information every so often to determine for distribution group modifications.  After some messing around with this, I see this is separate from the Address Book syncing as I attempted to manually syncronize the Address Book service and even went as far as deleting the GalContacts.db file on our client to force a re-download of the Address Book files.

I did some research and found this post here.  Unfortunately others are seeing the same and no answer has really been provided on how the distribution group information gets updated or how to force it; if even possible.

For those that do not know, the Address Book files is what allow our clients to search for SIP enabled users and Distribution Groups.  It also providers other functionality such as Phone Number Normalization when doing Remote Call Control.  This information gets stored on our client as GalContacts.db in “%userprofile%\ Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Communicator\.”  The Address Book gets updated in OCS every 24 hours which can be expedited by navigating to the following directory and running the following command:

Preparation of OCS 2007 Edge Node

Network Interface Card (NIC) Configuration

In Part 1, I put the Internal NIC on our VMNet8 which is our NAT Network.  I stated that I would put all other NICs on VMNet7.  When bringing up this server, I put all NICs on VMNet8 to ensure that there is IP Connectivity all around.  The reason for this is I don’t have VMNet7 and VMNet8 routed with each other. In a production network, I would following the OCS Planning Guide to ensure your networks are configured properly.  For example, your Internal NIC would be placed on your Internal Network while external adapters would be on a separate subnet such as a DMZ.

The first thing I always do is rename the NICs appropriately so you know what NIC you are working with.

On our Internal Edge NIC, we want to configure the IP Configuration as follows.  This NIC will contain the default gateway and DNS Settings.  Becuase of this, we will later ensure that this NIC is at the top of the binding order.

Our Audio/Video Edge NIC will be configured as follows.

Our Access Edge NIC will be configured as follows.

Our Web Conferencing Edge NIC will be configured as follows.

Binding Order

Set the Internal NIC to be at the top of the binding order.  This is because this is our internal corporations communications NIC.  It is the NIC that has DNS applied to it and will be talking to the rest of the internal servers.

ISA 2006 Configuration

Root Certificate

The first thing we will want to do is take the root certificate from our internal CA and place it into the Root Computer Certificate Store on ISA.  If your ISA box is part of the domain, if your CA is an Enterprise Root CA, your ISA box will automatically retrieve this certificate upon rebooting.  For any other type of CA configuration, you must manually obtain the Root Certificate.  The reason we we need this Root Certificate is because when we Bridge our external connection to our internal connection via SSL, we will need to trust the internal FQDN which has a certificate requested from our internal CA.

To do this, go onto your the Certificate Authority (CA) Server.  Our OCS-DC1 server is our CA.  Open the Certificates MMC by going to Start > Run > MMC.  Go to File > Add/Remove Snap-In > Add > Certificates > Computer Account.

Go to our Trusted Root Certification Authorities and find our Root Certificate.  Once you find it, Export the Certificate and transfer this exported certificate to ISA 2006.

Back on our ISA Box, open the Computer Certificates Snap-In just as we did on our CA.  In the same location (Trusted Root Certification Authorities > Certificates), we will import the certificate that we exported on our CA.  Once you choose Import, navigate to the location of the exported certificate and import it.

External Web Farm Certificate

Now let’s go ahead and get a certificate that matches the external Web Farm FQDN that we specified when deploying our Pool.  This name is ExtWebFarm.shudnow.net.  To do this, I installed IIS on ISA to request the certificate.

In IIS, go onto your Default Website > Properties > Directory Security Tab.

You will see a section entitled Secure Communications. Click Server Certificate to begin the process of requesting a certificate.

Choose Create New Certificate. Click Next to Continue.

In a production environment, you will choose to Prepare the request now, but send it later and submit the request to a 3rd party certificate authority such as Entrust.  This is because you’ll want internet clients to be able to automatically trust this certificate.  For purposes of this lab, I will just choose to Send the request imediately to an online certificate authority to expedite the process. Click Next to Continue.

Note: I left the Prepare the request now, but send it later selected by default.  If you are doing a lab scenario like I am, feel free to select the second option (like me) to expedite the process.  The rest of the screenshots will be using the second expedited method.

By default, the Certificate Name will be set to your web site name.  Change this to the FQDN of the External Web Farm FQDN. Click Next to Continue.

Note: The Certificate Name is not the Subject Name (SN) / Common Name (CN) of the certificate, but I always match the SN / CN of the certificate to the Certificate Name.

You will be asked for your Organization information.  Enter it appropriately. Click Next to Continue.

You will now be asked for your SN / CN.  Specify the name to be ExtWebFarm.shudnow.net Click Next to Continue.

You will be asked for your Geographical information.  Enter it appropriately. Click Next to Continue.

Since we specified the OCS Certificate Request to send the request immediately to an online certificate authority, OCS will search for an Issuing CA. The name of our CA (not server name but the name of the CA) is OCS-ROOTCA, OCS will display this server as the CA to use.  Choose OCS-DC1.shudnow.net\OCS-ROOTCA as our CA. Click Next to Continue.

Now in a production environment where you submitted your CSR to a vendor such as Entrust, they will provide you some text information back.  You will take this text, place it into a text file, and save the file as a .cer file.  You will then go back into IIS and Assign the .cer file to your request.  What essentially happens is when you create your CSR, you create a private key on your IIS Server.  The vendor will take some information appropriate to your private key and create a public key that associates itself with your private key.  When you assign your certificate, you essentially bind your public/private key to form a certificate.

Once the certificate is properly assigned, you will see the View Certificate button light up.

If you click on View Certificate, you will see the certificate has a CN of ExtWebFarm.shudnow.net

If you performed these procedures on an IIS instance located on a server that is not your IIS Server, you must ensure you export the certificate with its private key and import it into the Local Computer Certificate Store on ISA.  This will allow you to attach the certificate to the web listener we will be creating.  The procedures for importing a certificate are listed above.  The only difference is the store you import it into.

Once you are finished with your certificate request, if IIS is still enabled on ISA, make sure you turn it off (uninstall) otherwise ISA will fail to proxy due to a port conflict between IIS and the Web Listener.

ISA Configuration

We will need to configure ISA to proxy requests for the following three functions:

• To enable external users to download meeting content for your meetings
• To enable external users to expand distribution groups
• To enable remote users to download files from the Address Book Service

The Web Components Server will use the following directories to allow external clients to connect through using the External Web Farm FQDN.

To start creating the configuration for ISA, we will want to create a Web Site Publishing Rule.  We will name it OCS External Web Farm.

Select Allow. Click Next to Continue.

Select Publish a single Web site or load balancer. The reason why we only publish a single website is because the server we connect to will be our pool name (Ocspool.shudnow.net).  This will essentially load balance our ISA request to both of our Front End Servers. Click Next to Continue.

Select Use SSL to connect to the published Web server or server farm. Click Next to Continue.

Enter our Internal Site name which is the Internal Farm FQDN we specified when we created our Enterprise Pool.  This internal site name should match our pool name. Enter the IP Address for our Enterprise Pool.  Since we only deployed one Front End Server, this IP Address is the address of our Front End.  If we are deploying multiple Front End Servers behind a Hardware Load Balancer, this IP Address would be the Virtual IP (VIP) of our Hardware Load Balancer. Click Next to Continue.

We will want to use /* for our Path so we can create one rule to allow us to proxy all data destined to our External Web Farm FQDN to our Front End Server. Click Next to Continue.

We will want to enter our External Web Farm FQDN as our Public Name. Click Next to Continue.

We are now prompted to select a Web Listener.  Because we haven’t created one, go ahead and select New. Name this Web Listener OCS External Web Farm. Click Next to Continue.

We will definitely want to require SSL secured connections with clients. Click Next to Continue.

Select External since we will allowing Internet Clients to use this listener in which the DNS will be pointing to the Selected IP Address for our External connection.  To select the IP Address for our External connection, Click the Select IP Addresses button.

Select the IP Address that we will be using for our External NIC.  The reason why it doesn’t show the IP Address for our 192.x.x.x address is because our 192.168.119.x network is selected as our Internal Network.  You select your internal subnets when installing ISA. Click OK and then Next to Continue.

We must now choose our ExtWebFarm.shudnow.net certificate for this listener.  Choose Select Certificate and choose our ExtWebFarm.shudnow.net Certificate. Click OK and then Next to Continue.

No Authentication will be used. Click Next to Continue.

When back in the rule configuration, you will want to ensure that you select No Delegation, but client may authenticate directly. Click Next to Continue.

All the remaining options should be left at default.  All you need to do now is configure a HOST (A) record on your external DNS solution so ExtWebFarm.shudnow.net points to the IP Address of your ISA Server whether that is with a public IP Address directly on ISA or through a NAT’d Address.

The last modification we need to make is to go into the properties of our rule (not listener) and go to the From Tab.  Remove Anywhere and add External.  Click OK to Finish.

Note:  Again, if IIS is still enabled on ISA, make sure you turn it off (uninstall) otherwise ISA will fail to proxy due to a port conflict between IIS and the Web Listener.

Summary

Well folks, that is all for Part 4 of this article. For Part 5, I will go through the installation and configuration of our Consolidated OCS 2007 Edge Server

In this Part, I will go over the remaining steps required to deploying our Front End Server in an Enterprise Pool Deployment. This includes going through the initial configuration of the pool, certificates, and adding our Front End Server to our newly created pool that uses a SIP namespace (exchange.shudnow.net) that is separate than our AD Namespace (shudnow.net). We will begin the steps needed to validate our configuration to make sure the Front End OCS Server is healthy.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Front End OCS 2007 Server Installation

When installing OCS in a consolidated Enterprise Edition deployment, you would perform the following steps:

1. Prepare Active Directory (Completed in Part 2)
2. Create an Enterprise Pool (Completed in Part 2)
3. Configure a Load Balancer (Completed in Part 2)
4. Configure Pool / DNS
5. Add Server to Pool
6. Configure Certificate
7. Configure Web Components Server Certificate
8. Verify Replication
9. Start Services
10. Validate Server and Pool Functionality

Configure Pool / DNS (Step 4)

We are now on Step 4 which is to Configure our Pool and Configure DNS. Click Run to Continue.

As stated previously, we will be using a SIP domain that is different from our Active Directory domain.  This SIP domain is called exchange.shudnow.net.  The reason I am doing this is to show you how you can set up your SIP namespace to be different from your Active Directory domain which is not uncommon.  For example, in many organizations, their domain may be domain.local while their SMTP namespace will be domain.com.

The method I am using would be the same thing.  You would have an Active Directory domain, and then use a different namespace for SMTP/SIP.   In the case of our lab, I am only using Exchange to show distribution group expansion within OCS.  But in a production environment, you can use the same namespace for both Exchange and OCS.  This is the actually recommended.

Note: A person by the name of Simo notified me that Exchange is not required for group expansion.  As long as your distribution group has a value in the “mail” attribute field, group expansion will work.

So just to ensure you understand, let me show some examples:

Example 1:

• Active Directory Domain Namespace- shudnow.net
• OCS Namespace – shudnow.net
• Exchange Namespace – shudnow.net

Example 2:

• Active Directory Domain Namespace- shudnow.net, shudnow.local, staff.shudnow.net, staff.shudnow.local, etc…
• OCS Namespace – exchange.shudnow.net (can be different from Exchange Namespace)
• Exchange Namespace – exchange.shudnow.net (can be different from OCS Namespace)

On the Welcome Screen, Click Next to Continue.

You will then be prompted to install the Administrative Tools if they have not been installed already.  You don’t have much of a choice here and you must install these tools. Click Next to Continue which will begin the installation process of the Administrative Tools.

We now must choose what Pool we want to configure.  Considering we only have one pool, leave the selection (don’t have much of a choice) at OCSPool.shudnow.net. Click Next to Continue.

I would make sure you fully understand the differences between choosing SNAT Vs DNAT.  In a previous Part, I posted two links which provide you with the information you need to understand load balancing for OCS.  One of these guides was the planning document for hardware load balancing which you can view here.  It is recommended not to change this setting after OCS has been installed.  So please make sure you understand the differences and make your choice appropriately.

Choose SNAT as the method of load balancing. Click Next to Continue.

We are now presented with the SIP domains in our environment.

Since we will be using exchange.shudnow.net, we will need to add that in there.  Do not remove shudnow.net as a SIP domain.  If you recall, when we did our Forest Prep, we chose our Active Directory domain for SIP Routing.  Because of this, we will have two SIP domains; one for routing and one for user access.  You will then want to type in exchange.shudnow.net and click Add. Click Next to Continue.

When you set Communicator to connect to your OCS pool, you can configure it to automatically connect or to manually connect.  We will configure OCS to allow for automatic client logons.  If we had multiple pools and we wanted users who connected to this Pool to be redirected to another Pool, we would ensure that “Use this server or pool to authenticate and redirect automatic client logon requests” is checked. Click Next to Continue.

Since we are enabling our Pool to allow automatic logons, we must specify which SIP domains will be allowed for automatic logons.  Choose exchange.shudnow.net and then Next to Continue.

Note: We will not be doing the actual DNS configuration to support our new SIP namespace until we get to the part where will be connecting via Communicator.  This way, you can see step by step what fails and how to rectify the failure to ensure a successful automatic logon.

We do not have our Edge Topology up and running.  The recommended method of deploying a new OCS organization is to bring up your internal servers and then your Edge Servers.  If you are migrating from LCS, you must deploy your new Edge Topology first since an LCS Access Proxy cannot proxy to an OCS organization whereas an OCS Access Edge can proxy to both LCS and OCS. Select, “Do not configure for external user access now” and then Next to Continue.

We are finally ready to Configure our Enterprise Pool, you can review your Current Settings.  When satisfied, Click Next to Continue.

The configuration will now commense which will be pretty quick.  In fact, it’s too quick for me to grab a screenshot.  When the Pool Configuration is finished, Click Finish.  You will be given the option to view the log which I advise you to do to ensure everything went OK.

Add Server to Pool (Step 5)

We are now on Step 4 which is to Configure our Pool and Configure DNS. As a prerequisite, you’ll need to install IIS by following the instructions here. You may also need your SP2 binaries and CD1 of your Server 2003 Installation CD. Once IIS has been installed, you will have to restart Setup. Once back at the Deploy Pool in a Consolidated Topology, Click Run to Continue.

On the Welcome Screen and Licensing Information (after reading all the licensing information and choosing that you agree if you agree with the licensing terms), Click Next to Continue.

Specify where you want OCS to be installed.  We will use the default location. Click Next to Continue.

We are ready to Add our Server to our Enterprise Pool. You can review your Current Settings.  When satisfied, Click Next to Continue.

The configuration will now commence which will install all of the OCS roles onto this Front End Server due to it being Consolidated Front End.

Once the roles have been installed on your Front End Server, you will have to specify what Pool we want to join this server to.  Considering we only have one pool, leave the selection (don’t have much of a choice) at OCSPool.shudnow.net. Click Next to Continue.

You will now be prompted to specify passwords for your Service Accounts.  I recommend to use long secure passwords.  You can view this and this site which assist in choosing strong passwords.  You will have to do this for several Service Accounts:

• RTCService
• RTCComponentService
• RTCGuestAccessUser

Once you have set a password for all three accounts, Click Next to Continue.

We are ready to Activate our Components. You can review your Current Settings.  When satisfied, Click Next to Continue.

The server will go through a procedure which activates each OCS Server role on our Front End Server. When the Activation is finished, Click Finish.  You will be given the option to view the log which I advise you to do to ensure everything went OK.

Configure Certificate (Step 6)

We are now on Step 6 which is to Configure our Certificate. Click Run to Continue.

On the Welcome Screen, Click Next to Continue.

The next screen will be familiar to many of you.  It’s going through the process of creating a certificate request.  Since we have not created a certificate for our Front End Server, we will want to Choose to Create a new certificate. Click Next to Continue.

Because we have an internal CA installed, we can send the request immediately to an online certificate authority. Click Next to Continue.

By default, the Certificate Name will be set to your server name.  Change this to the FQDN of the Enterprise Pool. Click Next to Continue.

Note: The Certificate Name is not the Subject Name (SN) / Common Name (CN) of the certificate, but I always match the SN / CN of the certificate to the Certificate Name.  On a Standard Edition Server, this would be the FQDN of the server’s computer name.  When deploying OCS in an Enterprise Pool, this would be the FQDN of the pool name, not the server name.  You would then export this certificate after you have obtained the certificate and place the certificate on all other Front End Servers.

You will be asked for your Organization information.  Enter it appropriately. Click Next to Continue.

You will now be asked for your SN / CN.  As stated previously, because we created an Enterprise Pool, we want this name to be the FQDN of our Enterprise Pool.  Because we will be using a second SIP domain (exchange.shudnow.net), we will need to add a Subject Alternative Name (SAN) for sip.exchange.shudnow.net (sip.SIPDomainName.TLD).  The SAN should automatically be filled in for you due to Step 4 which is when we Configured our Pool. Click Next to Continue.

You will be asked for your Geographical information.  Enter it appropriately. Click Next to Continue.

Since we specified the OCS Certificate Request to send the request immediately to an online certificate authority, OCS will search for an Issuing CA. The name of our CA (not server name but the name of the CA) is OCS-ROOTCA, OCS will display this server as the CA to use.  Choose OCS-DC1.shudnow.net\OCS-ROOTCA as our CA. Click Next to Continue.

We are ready to Request our Certificate. You can review your Current Settings.  When satisfied, Click Next to Continue.

We should now have our certificate.  Click Assign to ensure that OCS begins to use this certificate. Click OK and Finish to Continue.

Configure Web Components Server Certificate (Step 7)

We are now on Step 7 which is a really straight forward manual step.

It consists of opening IIS (Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager).

Go to the Default Website > Right-Click > Choose Properties.

Click on the Directory Security Tab.

In Directory Security, you will see a Secure Communications Section. Click Server Certificate to Continue.

On the Welcome Screen, Click Next to Continue.

Since we already have a certificate on this Front End Server, we will choose to Assign an existing certificate. Click Next to Continue.

Since the certificate is installed on this server already, it’ll find this certificate automatically.  If you are deploying a second Front End Server, you’ll need to make sure you import the certificate with its’ private key into the Local Computer Certificate Store. Click Next to Continue.

The last prompt through this wizard will be for what SSL port to use.  Leave the default at 443. Click through the remaining prompts to finish assigning the certificate.

Note: The reason why you want to assign the certificate to IIS is because the Address Book is a part of the web components server.  Remember setting up the share for this?  Because clients access this Address Book via SSL and the ABS folder within IIS is set to use SSL, we need to make sure IIS uses a certificate to grant SSL access to ABS.  If you don’t, clients won’t be able to access the ABS and will get an ABS error when using Communicator.

Verify Replication (Step 8)

We are now on Step 8 which is to Verify Replication. This is a manual step that I will not go over. Click Help to see the LCSCMD commands used to verify replication.

Start Services (Step 9)

We are now on Step 9 which is to Start Services. Click Run to start the OCS Services.  I will not provide screenshots of this process as it is extremely straightforward.

Validate Server and Pool Functionality (Step 10A)

We are now finally on our final Step, Step 10 which is to Validate Server and Pool Functionality.  This step helps us ensure that our environment is working properly.  I am dividing this step between 2 steps; Step10a and Step10b.  Part of this, is to go through with the validation, DNS needs to be set up.  But because, as I stated earlier, I want to not to DNS yet so we can go through the Communicator logon step by step without DNS and see how to get automatic client logon working, we will finish Step 10 in the next Part.

Server and Pool Validation requires you to have a SIP enabled user account.  To do this, we must use Active Directory Users and Computers on our OCS server.  To do this, go to Start > Run > Type dsa.msc and Click OK.  If you are running a 64-bit OCS Server, you would do this by typing “dsa.msc -32″ in the run field.  64-bit OCS servers are only allowed for specific roles.  An Enterprise Front End is not one of them, so we will not have to use the -32 option.

For a list of OCS roles that support 64-bit using Windows on Windows 64 (OCS 32-bit installed on Windows x64), download the OCS planning guide here which I find to be more accurate than the Technet version in regards to 64-bit information.

So now that ADUC (dsa.msc) is open, go ahead and create a couple accounts.  For these user’s, I also mailbox enabled them after creating a new Accepted Domain for exchange.shudnow.net and setting up a new e-mail address policy so they obtain a primary e-mail address domain of exchange.shudnow.net.

I created the following two users:

• OCS User 1 (username of ocsuser1)
• OCS User 2 (username of ocsuser2)

Once these users are created, Right-Click the User and choose Enable users for Communications Server.

Tip: One of these options is to Move a User from one pool to another.  If you do this while the source server is up, the user will retain all user configuration/settings that are stored on the server.  For some reason if you have a catastrophic failure on one server, you can move the user to another pool without the source server being up, but that user will lose all of its server stored configuration/settings.

On the Welcome Screen, Click Next to Continue.

We now must choose what Pool we want to assign this user to.  Considering we only have one pool, leave the selection (don’t have much of a choice) at OCSPool.shudnow.net. Click Next to Continue.

Here is where we can assign the user as either shudnow.net or exchange.shudnow.net.  We only specified exchange.shudnow.net to allow for automatic sign-on so we will want to make sure we assign our users as exchange.shudnow.net.  You can use the shudnow.net name as long as you set those users to manually log on and you configure DNS appropriately.  You can allow shudnow.net to allow for automatic logon by re-running the previous wizards.

For purposes of this lab, I will use the user’s e-mail address since they are mailbox enabled and I don’t want users to have to know more than two sets of login usernames (one for Exchange/AD and a different one for OCS). Click Next which will begin the OCS-Enable process.  Once this is complete, click Finish to Finish.

But let’s say you wanted some users to have a different OCS SIP Address than their Exchange address.  Or even if you wanted to use the shudnow.net domain for SIP.  You could choose the following  option although you can e ither choose only firstname.lastname@SIPDomain or sAMAccountName@SIPDomain.

I would now go ahead and OCS enable your second user.  Once finished, you can refresh ADUC and verify these users have a Communications Server address.

Summary

Well folks, that is all for Part 3 of this article. For Part 4, I will go through the installation of our Office Communicator 2007 client and get it connected through OCS by configuring DNS. I will then begin preparation of our Edge Servers followed by configuring our ISA 2006 Server.

In this Part, I will go over the preparation and installation of a Front End OCS 2007 Server Pool.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Front End OCS 2007 Server Installation

When installing OCS in a consolidated Enterprise Edition deployment, you would perform the following steps:

1. Prepare Active Directory
2. Create an Enterprise Pool
3. Configure a Load Balancer
4. Configure Pool / DNS
5. Add Server to Pool
6. Configure Certificate
7. Configure Web Components Server Certificate
8. Verify Replication
9. Start Services
10. Validate Server and Pool Functionality

Note: We will not be able to go over all the steps in this Part 2 due to the amount of steps and sub-steps required to perform.

Prepare Active Directory (Step 1)

Our Domain Controller with Windows Server 2003 SP2 is installed and fully functional.  To begin the Active Directory preparation process, we can insert our OCS CD.  There are some prerequisites for installing OCS such as .Net Framework 2.0, but this is all taken care of during the installation.

Insert the CD and let’s begin the installation process.  You will be asked to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable. Click Yes to Continue.

You will then be asked to install the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. Click Yes to Continue.

Once Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 is installed, you will be presented with the Deployment Wizard.  We will want to deploy our Enterprise Pool in a Consolidated Topology.  Click Deploy Pools in a Consolidated Topology to Continue.

We are now on Step 1 which is to Prepare Active Directory. Click Prepare Active Directory to Continue.

We are now presented with sub-steps to perform to complete our Active Directory Preparation.  These sub-steps include:

1. Prepare Schema
2. Verify Replication of Schema Partition
3. Prep Forest
4. Verify Replication of Global Settings and Global Catalog
5. Prep Current Domain
6. Verify Replication of the Domain
7. Delegate Setup and Administration

Click Run for Prepare Schema to Continue.

On the Welcome Screen, Click Next to Continue. Select “Default: Schema files are located in the same directory as Setup.”  Click Next to Continue.

You are now ready to Prepare the Schema.  Click Next to Begin Schema Preparation.

When the Schema Preparation is finished, Click Finish.  You will be given the option to view the log which I advise you to do to ensure everything went OK.

We are brought back to the Deployment Wizard.  The Prep Schema step has been complete as is shown next to the Run button.

We will skip through all the Replication Steps (Verify Replication of Schema Partition, Verify Replication of Global Settings and Global Catalog, and Verify Replication of the Domain) due to the fact we have only 1 Domain Controller in this lab.  In a production environment where you have more than one Domain Controller (hopefully), I highly advise you to ensure replication for each step has completed successfully before continuing.

We are now ready to run the Prep Forest step. Click Run for Prep Forest to Continue.

On the Welcome Screen, Click Next to Continue.

You are presented with two options:

• System Container in the Root Domain
• Configuration Partition

To decide which option to choose, follow this diagram provided by the Microsoft OCS Team to make a decision.  You can read the blog post which contains this image as well as a lot more information here.

Because this lab contains only one Domain Controller, we will choose the Default setting of System Container in the Root Domain. Click Next to Continue.

We will want to store our Universal Groups in our shudnow.net domain.  In the case of this lab, we will have to due to the fact that this is our only domain.  Select shudnow.net and Click Next to Continue.

We will use our Active Directory domain name shudnow.net for OCS routing.  Click Next to Continue.

You are now ready to Prepare the Forest.  Click Next to Begin Forest Preparation.

When the Forest Preparation is finished, Click Finish.  You will be given the option to view the log which I advise you to do to ensure everything went OK.

We are brought back to the Deployment Wizard where we will now run the Prep Current Domain.  This step should be run in any domain that will contain users that will be OCS (SIP) enabled.

Click Run for Prepare Current Domain to Continue.

On the Welcome Screen, Click Next to Continue.

On the next screen that provides Domain Preparation Information, read the excerpt provided and Click Next to Continue.

You are now ready to prepare the domain.  Because we have only 1 domain and are running this step in our shudnow.net domain, our current settings will display as shudnow.net. Click Next to Continue.

When the Domain Preparation is finished, Click Finish.  You will be given the option to view the log which I advise you to do to ensure everything went OK.

The final step is to Delegate Setup and Administration.  Because we are doing everything using a Domain/Enterprise/Schema Administrator account, we will not have to configure Delegation.

Creating File Shares

Because our Universal Groups have been created, we can now create file shares that are necessary for the following functions:

• Presentations – Meeting presentations to be downloaded or streamed by conference attendees.
• Metadata – Meeting information (metadata) that is used internally by the Web Conferencing Server component for the pool.
• ABS - Address Book information that is used by the Address Book Server, which is included with the Web Components Server, in order to provide global address list information to Office Communicator 2007 and Office Communicator 2005 clients on a daily basis.
• MeetingCompliance (optional) – Meeting activities and content uploaded during meetings.  We will talk about how to enable Meeting Compliance in a future Part.

These shares can be created on a File Server in your environment.  We will be creating these shares on our OCS FE Server which means that our OCS Server will also be our Web Components Server.

We will create a folder called C:\OCS on our OCS Server.  Within those four folders, we will create the following four folders:

• Presentations
• Metadata
• ABS
• MeetingComp

Each of these folders will need to be shared out.  We will use a share name that matches the folder name for simplicity sake.  Grant Full Control on each of these shared folders to the administrator, the RTCUniversalServerAdmins group, and any other user or group responsible for creating pools. Remove Read permission from the Everyone group.

Update: I accidentally left out that you need to add the RTCComponentUniversalServices group to the permissions as well with Full Control.

Update2: The Presentations needs to allow Everyone read permissions in order for people to download uploaded content to Live Meeting.

Make sure you provide both RTCUniversalServerAdmins and Administrators Full Control via NTFS permissions as well.  Because our folders are in the OCS folder, we can add these permissions on C:\OCS and they will flow down to our sub folders through inheritance.

Create and Enterprise Pool (Step 2)

Before we continue on, we need to do some prerequisite work.  This prerequisite work is detailed here.  For purposes of this lab, I would focus on the SQL Server 2005 x64 information since we are using SQL Server 2005 x64.

Because we are running SQL Server 2005 x64, we will need to create our pool on a x86 system.  Because our OCS Front End is x86, we will use our OCS Front End for Pool Creation.  And because we will be doing this from a remote system (our Front End), we will need to install the SQL database management objects (SQL DMO) on our Front End.  This functionality is included in the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Backward Compatibility Components which you can find here.  Make sure you download the x86 version.  Once that has been installed, you can now proceed.

We are now on Step 2 which is to Create an Enterprise Pool.  This is where you will definitely need to have your SQL Back End fully configured. You can use SQL Server 2005 (x86 or x64) with SP1+.  You can also use SQL Server 2000 SP4+. Click Run to Continue.

On the Welcome Screen, Click Next to Continue.

We must now decide what we want our Pool Name to be.  On an OCS Standard Edition Server, your Pool name is the name of your server.  But since we are using Enterprise Edition, we must select a name that won’t match any other existing records currently housed in DNS.  We will use the name, OCSPool.  Our SQL Server was installed using the Default Instance.  Because of that, all we will need to do is ensure we are logged on with an account that is a member of Domain Admins, RTCUniversalServerAdmins, and has permissions to create and manage SQL Databases. Click Next to Continue.

We will want to leave our Internal web farm FQDN alone.  This should be the pool name.  If you are going to be installing multiple Front End Servers behind a Hardware Load Balancer, the OCS Pool DNS would be pointed to your Hardware Load Balancer Virtual IP Address which would then direct the traffic to one of your Front End Servers.

The External Web Farm FQDN is used by your ISA Server.  It allows you to reverse proxy (publish) your Address Book, Web Conferencing Meeting Content, as well as expansion of Exchange Universal Distribution Groups.  I would recommend configuring this during the install as you cannot modify this through the OCS Administrative GUI.  You can use the guide here to modify the External web farm FQDN should you decide you don’t want to set this FQDN during install or wish to change it at a later time. Click Next to Continue.

Note:  I used the FQDN of ExtWebFarm.shudnow.net.  Taking a look at this from a perspective of a production environment, the shudnow.net name is my AD Domain.  If you do not have split-dns, you can use the same namespace that you will be SIP enabling users.  For example, our SIP Domain is exchange.shudnow.net.  So I can easily just do ExtWebFarm.exchange.shudnow.net.

I am selecting to overwrite any existing database since I did use my SQL Server for a previous OCS installation.

OCS is smart enough to detect whether SQL has any volumes that are now the system volume.  When it does detect these separate volumes, it will try to optimize the locations as much as possible.  Because I do have a separate LUN/volume on my SQL Server, OCS automatically used the E:\ volume to place Database and Log files.  Make any changes here as you wish.  There is a Database Planning guide located here. Click Next to Continue.

The time has now come to specify the location of the shares we created above.  These should be:

• Presentations – \\OCS-OCS1\Presentations
• Metadata – \\OCS-OCS1\Metadata
• ABS – \\OCS-OCS1\ABS
• MeetingComp – \\OCS-OCS1\MeetingComp

Make sure you test all of the Universal Naming Convention (UNC) paths work prior to proceeding.  If they do work, enter the UNC paths as is displayed in my screenshot. Click Next to Continue.

Configure your the ABS UNC Path. Click Next to Continue.

Since we will not be enabling Archiving or CDR in our environment, leave the Archiving and CDR settings unchecked. Click Next to Continue.

We are finally ready to create our Enterprise Pool!  Review your Current Settings.  When satisfied, Click Next to Continue.

When the Pool Creation is finished, Click Finish.  You will be given the option to view the log which I advise you to do to ensure everything went OK.

Configure a Load Balancer (Step 3)

If you are going to be doing any type of redundancy, you will need to use a Hardware Load Balancer such as an F5 BIGIP with the LTM Module.

The steps required to configure a Load Balancer is out of the scope of this article as we are deploying a single Front End server which does not require a Hardware Load Balancer.

The hardware load balancing planning information can be found here.

The hardware load balancing deployment information can be found here.

Summary

Well folks, that is all for Part 2 of this article. For Part 3, I will go through the initial configuration of the pool, certificates, and adding our Front End Server to our newly created pool that uses a SIP namespace (exchange.shudnow.net) that is separate than our AD Namespace (shudnow.net). We will begin the steps needed to validate our configuration to make sure the Front End OCS Server is healthy.

This article is to guide you through the entire OCS deployment process from scratch. This article will include the following:

1. Certificate Services installation
2. Single Enterprise Front End Server – with information on what to do to get a second Front End Server installed behind a Hardware Load Balancer
3. Consolidated Edge Server – with information on what to do to deploy a Single-Site Edge Topology or a Scaled Single-Site Edge Topology instead
4. Dual-Homed ISA 2006 Installation to reverse proxy internal services

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Lab Setup

Guest Virtual Machines

One Server 2003 Enterprise (Standard can be used) SP2 x64 Domain Controller which Certificate Services will be installed as the Enterprise Root Certificate Authority. Exchange 2007 SP1 will be installed with the Hub Transport Server, Client Access Server, and Mailbox Server Role. The purpose of Exchange in this lab is due to the Group Expansion requirement where a Universal Distribution Group must be mail-enabled for it to be expanded within Office Communication 2007.

Two Server 2003 Enterprise (Standard can be used) x86 (x86 required) Member Servers where OCS 2007 will be installed. One of these servers will be the Consolidated Edge Server which will contain 4 NICs.

One Server 2003 Enterprise (Standard can be used) x86 (x86 required) Member Server where ISA 2006 will be installed as a dual-homed box.

One Server 2003 Enterprise (Standard can be used) x64 (x86 can be used) Member Server where SQL 2005 SP2 will be installed.

Assumptions

• You have a domain that contains at least one Server 2003 SP2 Domain Controller (DC) – This is required due to Exchange 2007 SP1 being installed on the Domain Controller.
• You have configured the IP settings accordingly for all servers to be on the same subnet. I have provided the IP scheme of my lab below, but this will vary depending on your needs and VMware configuration. One exception to this is one NIC on the ISA Server will belong to a different subnet. This NIC would be the NIC that lives in the DMZ in a production environment.
• Exchange 2007 Hub Transport Server, Client Access Server, and Mailbox Server are installed on our Server 2003 SP2 DC. Installing Exchange 2007 on a Domain Controller is not a recommended practice for production. But for purposes of this lab, we will do so to consolidate and conserve resources. This article does not go over the installation or configuration of these roles but will go over mail-enabling a Distribution Group(s).
• You have a SQL 2005 SP1 or SP2 server installed. We will be using SP2 for purposes of this lab.
• You have a copy of Office Communicator (OC) 2007. We will be installing our copy of OC 2007 on OCS-DC1.

Computer Names

OCS Front End Server – OCS-OCS1

OCS Consolidated Edge Server – OCS-OCS2

Domain Controller / Exchange Server / Root Enterprise CA – OCS-DC1

ISA Server – OCS-ISA1

SQL Server – OCS-SQL1

Configuration of VMware Workstation for Domain Controller / Exchange Server / Root Enterprise CA

There is no official VMWare support for Server 2008 at the time of writing this article. Although we will be using Server 2003 for all Virtual Machines in this lab, the Domain Controller with Exchange 2007 SP1 can be installed on Server 2008. All other machines must be installed on Server 2003. The latest version and build is VMWare 6.0.4 build-93057. There is currently “experimental” support which you will see (if you do use Server 2008) when specifying the Operating System as you create your Virtual Machine. Through my experiences in the past, I did not encounter any real issues related to Windows Server 2008 and VMware Workstation 6.0.2 build-59824. If you do choose to use Server 2008, there will be differences in the installation and configuration of Certificate Services.

Processor: 2

Memory: 1112MB

Network Type - Public NIC - VMnet8 – Network Address Translation (Used so Virtual Machines get an IP Address without taking up IP Addresses at a client’s site while still being granted Internet access through NAT functionality)

Virtual Disk Type – System Volume (C:\): VMware SCSI 8GB

Note: In a real-world environment, depending on the needs of the business and environment, it is best practice to install your database and logs on separate disks/spindles. We will be installing Active Directory, Certificate Services, and Exchange 2007 SP1 on the same disks/spindles for simplicity sakes for this lab.

Configuration of SQL 2005 SP2

Processor: 2

Memory: 384MB

Network Type - VMnet8 – Network Address Translation (Used so Virtual Machines get an IP Address without taking up IP Addresses at a client’s site while still being granted Internet access through NAT functionality)

Virtual Disk Type – System Volume (C:\): VMware SCSI 8GB

Virtual Disk Type – SQL Database/Logs (D:\): SCSI 3GB

Note: We will be installing the Database/Logs on a separate volume to see how the OCS installation reacts to seeing extra volumes on the SQL Server.

Configuration of ISA 2006 RTM

Processor: 2

Memory: 384MB

Network Type - VMnet8 – Network Address Translation (Used so Virtual Machines get an IP Address without taking up IP Addresses at a client’s site while still being granted Internet access through NAT functionality)

Network Type - VMnet7- Used to mimic your DMZ NIC for external/internet communication

Virtual Disk Type – System Volume (C:\): VMware SCSI 8GB

Configuration of OCS 2007 RTM Consolidated Edge

Processor: 2

Memory: 384MB

Network Type - VMnet8 – Network Address Translation (Used so Virtual Machines get an IP Address without taking up IP Addresses at a client’s site while still being granted Internet access through NAT functionality)

Network Type - VMnet7- Used to mimic DMZ NIC for external/internet communication for the Audio/Video Edge Server Role

Network Type - VMnet7- Used to mimic your DMZ NIC for external/internet communication for the Access Edge Server Role

Network Type - VMnet7- Used to mimic your DMZ NIC for external/internet communication for the Web Conferencing Server Role

Virtual Disk Type – System Volume (C:\): VMware SCSI 8GB

Note: There are few different ways the NICs could be set up on the Edge Roles. I have included a mini-write up below entitled, “Various Edge Server NIC Setups.”

Configuration of OCS 2007 RTM Front End

Processor: 2

Memory: 384MB

Network Type - VMnet8 – Network Address Translation (Used so Virtual Machines get an IP Address without taking up IP Addresses at a client’s site while still being granted Internet access through NAT functionality)

IP Addressing Scheme (Corporate Subnet) – VMnet8

IP Address – 192.168.119.x

Subnet Mask – 255.255.255.0

Default Gateway – 192.168.119.2

DNS Server – 192.168.119.150 (IP Address of the Domain Controller/DNS Server)

IP Addressing Scheme (DMZ Subnet) – VMnet7

IP Address – 10.10.10.x

Default Gateway – 10.10.10.x

Subnet Mask – 255.255.255.0

Preparation of ISA 2006 Node

Network Interface Card (NIC) Configuration

First thing we will want to do is configure the IP Configuration of both the Public DMZ NIC and Internal Corporate NIC.

We will want to rename our Publc DMZ NIC connection to Public and our Internal Corporate NIC connection to Private. To do so, go to Start > Control Panel. Once in the Control Panel, Double Click on Network Connections.

Now you will be presented with the Network Connections window. This is where you can modify the network properties for each NIC in your server. For your Internal Corporate Connection, rename your Local Area Connection to Internal. Likewise, for your Public DMZ Connection, rename your Local Area Connection to Public. After you have done this, it will look something similar to the following:

Note: Do not forget that part of the assumptions earlier in this article as that you have a properly configured TCP/IP Network where all nodes are properly connected to the TCP/IP Network. Because of this, I will skip the actual TCP/IP Configuration. The IP for the Internal NIC is 192.168.119.153/24. The IP for the Public NIC is 10.10.10.153/24 that would typically have a Public IP NAT’d to this Public IP via Static Network Address Translation (NAT) rule.

Important: In a production environment, you would generally have the Default Gateway on your public NIC. Depending on the communication and configuration of firewalls, you would want to create a static route so your internal communications would go directly to a router on the inside of your network that is more open to communications. This way, you would not have to open ports on your Edge firewall when not necessary. For example, if you were doing LDAPs and your DMZ Edge Firewall blocked port 636. You would need to create a static route so traffic destined to your internal corporate network would go to the internal router that allows 636. You would not need to do this if your DMZ Edge Firewall allowed port 636 and knew how to route to the internal corporate network.

To ensure you reduce the attack surface of your ISA Server, open the Public NIC properties, open the TCP/IP Properties > go into the Advanced NIC configuration settings by clicking the Advanced button. From there, you will navigate to DNS tab and de-select “Register this connection’s addresses in DNS.”

Select the WINS tab and de-select “Enable LMHOSTS lookup” and configure the NetBIOS setting to “Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP.”

Once you are done configuring the Advanced settings, press OK three times and you will be back at the Network Connections screen. From here, choose Advanced and select Advanced Settings…

You will be presented with the Binding Order for your current NICs. Ensure that the Internal NIC is on top by selecting Internal and pressing the green up arrow key on the right-hand side of the dialog. The reason you want Internal on top is because your Corporate communications happen on this NIC and things like DNS are configured on this NIC.

Rename Computer and Join to Active Directory Domain

Make sure you name your ISA box to a name that complies with your naming convention and then join your ISA box to the domain. For purposes of this lab, we will be naming this box, OCS-ISA1. A lot of Administrators believe that joining the ISA box to the domain is a security threat, but that is not so. Please refer to this article explaining why.

Preparation of Consolidated Edge Node

Follow through the same exact steps you did for the ISA 2006 node except for a few things. Instead of 2 NICs, add 4 instead. Also, do not join it to the domain.

A summary of the steps involved consist of:

• Create 4 NICs
• Rename the NIC that is wired to the Internal Corporate Network to Internal
• Rename the NICs that are wired to the DMZ appropriate to their function. Our Access Edge NIC will be named AccessEdge. Our Web Conferencing Edge NIC will be named WebConfEdge. Our Audio/Video Conferencing Edge NIC will be named AudioVideoConfEdge.
• Assign the appropriate IP Addresses to each NIC. In a production environment, your Audio/Video NIC will need to have a Public IP Address (Non NAT’d IP Address) assigned directly to this NIC. For more information, read here. For purposes of this lab, we’ll assign it an IP on our 10.10.10.x network since we won’t be testing Edge connectivity due to limited resources of our VM environment.
• Create Static Routes if necessary
• Disable the Public NIC from registering in DNS
• Disable the Public NIC’s NetBIOS settings
• Modify the Binding Order so the Internal NIC is on the top of the list.
• Rename the Computer
• Do NOT join it to the domain

Certificate Authority Configuration

Since we are using Windows Server 2003 SP2 for this, we will want to make sure that we have the SP2 binaries and our CD1 for our Windows Server 2003 Enterprise installation. It will be required when we install Certificate Services.

To begin the CA installation, go to Start > Control Panel. Once in the Control Panel, Double Click on Add or Remove Programs.

Click Add/Remove Windows Components.

Place a checkmark in the checkbox next to Certificate Services. You will automatically be prompted with a prompt warning you to not modify the computer name. Ensure your computer name is set correctly before continuing. Once you have your computer name set. Click Yes and then Next to Continue.

Because we will be choosing an Enterprise Root CA, leave the defaults selected. Click Next to Continue.

Note: Choosing an Enterprise Root CA can be considered a security risk to many. Make sure a proper design for a PKI infrastructure is done for both functionality, security, etc. before deploying an internal PKI solution for your organization. I am using an Enterprise Root CA because I am doing this in a test environment and it reduces the amount of resources needed for the lab.

We will name our Root CA OCS-CAROOT. Keep in mind, this is not our machine name. This is what the root certificate’s name will be. Click Next to Continue.

Specify where you want to store your Certificate Database and Logs. For purposes of this lab, we will install it on our System Partition (C:\). Click Next to Continue to begin installation. As stated earlier, make sure you have the SP2 binaries and CD1 of your Server 2003 Installation CD.

If you’re like me and always forget to install Internet Information Services (IIS) prior to installing Certificate Services, you will get the following prompt. Don’t worry, we’ll fix this after our Certificate Services installation completes. If you did get this prompt, Click OK to Continue.

Now our Certificate Services Installation should complete successfully. If you did forget to install IIS before Certificate Services installation began and you received the prompt above, go install IIS by following the instructions here. You will also need your SP2 binaries and CD1 of your Server 2003 Installation CD.

Once IIS is installed, to create the CertSrv subfolder within IIS, type the following command:

Certutil -vroot

Various Edge Server NIC Setups

When going over the NIC configuration of our Edge Servers, it has been noted that we will be using 4 NICs for our Consolidated Edge Server. This would be Method #1 below. As you can see, there are two other ways the NIC Setup could be configured.

Note: The IPs in the above diagram do not represent IPs we will be using in our lab. They are only a representation of what you may see in a production environment. For example, Public IP on Audio/Video Edge NIC, DMZ IPs on your Access Edge and Web Conferencing Edge NICs, and an Internal Corporate IP Address on your Internal NIC.

Method #1 (Recommended)

Every Role has its’ own dedicated NIC. This is recommended due to people having issues in the past with communications when roles share IP Addresses on the same NIC.

Method #2

The Audio/Video Edge Server is the only role that has a Public IP Address. Because of this, it is given its’ own NIC since the subnet it belongs to is different than all other roles. The Access Edge and Web Conferencing Edge Servers are on the same DMZ Subnet. Because of this, they are given 1 NIC to share. The internal NIC is also on a different subnet so its’ given its own NIC. The Internal NIC should always be on a dedicated NIC.

Method #3

It is also possible to use Public IPs on the Web Conferencing Edge Server as well as the Access Edge Server. Because of this, all 3 Edge Server Roles would have Public IPs meaning they can all be on the same NIC. You would then use a dedicated NIC for the Internal NIC.

Summary

Well folks, that is all for Part 1 of this article. For Part 2, I will go over the preparation and installation of a Front End OCS 2007 Server Pool.