Define the Director

Topic Last Modified: 2011-02-23

If you enable access for external users by deploying Edge Servers, you should also deploy a Director. A Director is a server running Microsoft Lync Server 2010 that authenticates user requests, but does not home any user accounts. When you use a Director to authenticate external users, it does the following:

• Relieves servers in the Front End pool from the overhead of performing authentication of these users.

• Helps insulate internal Front End pools from malicious traffic, such as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

• Ends traffic at the Director when the network is flooded with invalid external traffic in a DoS or similar attack. As a result, internal users should not experience any effect on performance.

To deploy any of the servers running Lync Server 2010, you must use Topology Builder first to define and publish your topology, including your Director and Edge Server topology.