How do I size and stress test my Lync servers?

This is a question I get a lot from my customers. In addition to using the new Lync Server 2010 Planning Tool, we just shipped a few tools to help you with the sizing of your Lync servers whether physical or virtual.

Two new tools have just shipped to help here:

• Lync Server 2010 Capacity Calculator grab it here. 

It has some nice flexibility since you can tweak users, calls, conferencing usage, etc:

It will also provide estimates on total number of servers needed and what roles for both physical and virtual (4 core):

How do I stress test my Lync hardware or VM?

Once you buy the hardware and you want to stress it you can use the LyncPerf load tool to stress the following roles:

• Instant messaging (IM) and presence
• Audio conferencing
• Application sharing
• Voice over IP (VoIP), including public switched telephone network (PSTN) simulation
• Web Access Client conferencing
• Microsoft Lync 2010 Attendant
• Response Groups
• Distribution list expansion
• Address book download and address book query
• E9-1-1 calls and location profile (dial plan)

User creation tool:

You can create groups, contacts for each user:

Create phone DIDs:

You can even create locations for the LIS for E911 testing:

Comes with several PowerShell scripts to populate and configure Lync:

You can create various Lync load files using the User profile generator tool:

You can specify various loads per role:

Different VOIP parameters:

Once you have the config files created. You need to actually run the stress tool from the cmd line with something like this:

RunClient0.bat C:\Program Files\Microsoft Lync Server 2010\LyncStressAndPerfTool\LyncStress 

or

LyncPerfTool.exe /file:IM_client0.xml /displayfile

There are many performance counters provided for each area of Lync you can look at during or after the test run such as:

• Lync Server 2010 Stress and Performance Tool grab it here.