Hybrid design with pooled standard servers

[Richard Sargeant]

Hi all,

I am just commencing one of my first SfB hybrid designs for an organisation that has about 700 users and some existing telephony services that cannot currently be replicated in the cloud. So a hybrid design seems appropriate but the customer has concerns about resilience for the services that will be homed on the on-prem server(s).
Because it's just 700 users, most of whom will be homed in the cloud I want to propose SfB standard edition.
Question is, can I still define 2 pools to be used in a hybrid scenario and thus be able to offer the customer pool failover for delayed continuity if one standard server fails? Specifically, does SfB hybrid allow more than one pool?

[#2]

Hello Richard!

Yes, there are many Hybrid deployments out there with multiple pools. When configuring Skype for Business Online, S4B Online needs to be able to resolve your organization from the internet, which means it will need to know where your Edge server is, and will communicate with your environment via that Edge server (or pool).

You will follow the procedures in this article to point your Edge server at the second pool during a failover scenario: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj204678(v=ocs.15).aspx. However, being failed over should not matter to your Skype for Business Online environment; as long as it can still reach the Edge server, and the Edge server is communicating with a Registrar that is aware of the Hybrid relationship, multiple pools in a Hybrid environment is not a problem.

Hope that helps!

Josh

[#3]

Hi Josh,

Very helpful. Thank you!

Richard

[#4]

Glad to hear! Best of luck!

Josh