Planning Process

High-Level Planning Process
We recommend the following general process for using both the documentation and the Planning Tool to plan your Lync Server deployment.

1. Run the Planning Tool to get a sense of the kind of questions you need to think about as you begin the planning process.
2.   Read New Server Features to familiarize yourself with the new features and requirements in Lync Server 2010.
3.   Read the other topics in this section: Topology Basics You Must Know Before Planning, Initial Planning Decisions, Clients for Lync Server 2010, and Reference Topologies.
4.   Now that you are more familiar with Lync Server features and the kinds of questions that must be answered, run the Planning Tool again and view the resulting topology and its details.
5. If there are particular workloads or features you are interested in or need to learn about, read the appropriate sections of Planning for Microsoft Lync Server 2010. 
6.   Run the Planning Tool again. You can start with the deployment you created in step 3 and modify the results, or start over from the beginning.

If needed, run the Planning Tool a third time and repeat until you are satisfied with the output.

1.  When you have finalized the topology plan, use the export feature of the Planning Tool to create an XML file that you can use with Topology Builder. Load that XML into Topology Builder and add final details such as IP addresses.
2.   Before you begin deployment, read Determining Your System Requirements and Determining Your Infrastructure Requirements to familiarize yourself with the prerequisites and necessary infrastructure for Lync Server. Additionally, be sure you have read all the sections of Planning for Microsoft Lync Server 2010 that apply to the workloads and features that you plan to deploy.

 Note:
At this time, the Planning Tool that is described in this documentation is a prerelease version. Final release of the Planning Tool is currently scheduled for the first quarter of 2011. For details about the release candidate, see the release notes that accompany the Planning Tool. Importing from a prerelease version of the Planning Tool to the final version of Topology Builder is not supported. Note that the capacity planning numbers in the Planning Tool are preliminary and are not supported for the final release.