Microsoft Azure is one of the key Infrastructure as a Service platform in public cloud space. Many organizations are looking at it as an alternative option for traditional datacenter. Therefore, it is necessary for consultant and architects to know about the enterprise application suitability on Azure IaaS. When customer look for Microsoft Public Cloud offerings, most of the time you can observe that customer is looking for Microsoft based applications or custom applications which runs on Microsoft operating system.

Let me take an opportunity to discuss about Microsoft Business Productivity applications and their suitability with Azure IaaS. Microsoft SharePoint was the first enterprise application from business productivity suite which was ready long back to deploy on Azure IaaS. Next precedence had been given to Exchange and now it is chance for Lync / Skype for Business.

In this blog post, I am going to discuss about key consideration for deploying skype for business on Azure IaaS. As of now, production deployment of skype for business is not recommended. I would say, there are technical limitations because of that deployment for Lync / Skype for Business is not recommended.

Below diagram illustrates how traditional datacenter deployment should look like in high level.

I am describing this traditional deployment first because you easily can correlate it with Azure IaaS later point in time. Now, let’s assume customer has basic infrastructure in-place such as Active Directory, Office Web Apps or Office Online server and Reverse Proxy. Therefore, it is a time for you to design or size Skype for Business server roles. I am taking a simple example of Skype for Business Enterprise Edition pool with three servers. In this example, I am collocating server roles wherever possible and not focusing on few additional server roles such as persistent chat and VIS.

Below table shows the typical server configuration based on Microsoft recommendation.

Numbers of network card mentioned in above table consider basic configuration. You can opt for NIC teaming for all the server roles. Skype for Business edge server role can have either 2 interfaces (one for internal and one for external) or 4 interfaces (one for internal and 3 for external).

Apart from this you need to consider many other factors in datacenter such as Network, Firewall, Load Balancers and Quality of service configuration capability. Next part of this article, maps these requirements with Azure IaaS and covers the best possible configuration.