We briefly introduced the importance of assessing the underlying network to ensure it is capable of handling real-time traffic for UC communications. In this recipe, we will present a practical example of network readiness assessment.
To prepare for the assessment, we need the following two main items:
The Lync 2010 and 2013 Bandwidth Calculator (available at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=19011). This tool is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet; it was purposely built to calculate bandwidth requirements based on estimated usage, scenarios, and network parameters.
A network assessment with the following information:
A list of sites where Lync endpoints will be located.
A count of Lync users for each site.
Nominal WAN bandwidth for each site (that is, maximum theoretical bandwidth).
Available bandwidth for RTC (that is, the amount of bandwidth we can reserve, in conjunction with QoS, for some Lync traffic).
Bandwidth of the central...