The Inside OCS Quality of Experience (QoE) – Quick Facts post has been a popular read. This post provides additional answers to the most common questions about deploying the OCS 2007 R2 Monitoring Role (which now houses the QoE and Call Detail Record (CDR) functionality in R2).
Q. Is installation of the Monitoring Server Role supported on a Virtual Image? A. No, it is only supported to run on phyiscal hardware (fyi – the same true for the Archiving Role). Q. Is it supported to use the OCS Monitoring Role in a virtualized pool? A. Yes, but only the CDR functionality. The Monitoring Role can be installed on a physical machine and connected to a virtualized pool. OCS server roles that provide any audio (or video) functionality are not supported in a virtualized Enterprise pool so associating the QoE Service with virtualized Enterprise pool is not supported.Collocation Questions & Answers
Q. Is it supported to collocate the R2 Monitoring Server databases with the OCS R2 Monitoring Role itself? A. Yes, with the usual scalability and performance caveat (e.g. design the database for optimal scalability and performance – see the “Scaling” section of the R2 Monitoring Deployment Guide). Q. Is it supported to collocate the R2 Monitoring Server with the Standard Edition server? A. Yes, however you must use the full edition of SQL Server on the server instead of using the SQL Server Express Edition normally used with a Standard Edition server. Q. Is it supported to collocate the R2 Monitoring Server databases on the same SQL server as other OCS server databases? (e.g. Enterprise or Standard back-end database, Archiving database, or the Response Group Service database, for example). A. Yes, with the usual scalability and performance caveat (e.g. design the database for optimal scalability and performance – see the “Scaling” section of the R2 Monitoring Deployment Guide). Q. Is it supported to collocate the R2 Monitoring Server databases with other databases from 3rd party products? A. Yes, however it is recommended you run the Monitoring Server databases in a separate instance from other databases (see the “Scaling” section of the R2 Monitoring Deployment Guide). Q. Can you install the QoE and CDR databases on different SQL servers? A. No. The Monitoring Server databases (the QoE and CDR databases) are seperate databases, but they both must run on the same SQL server (and in the same SQL instance). Q. What versions of SQL can the Monitoring databases use? A. SQL Server 2008 (32-bit or 64-bit) or SQL Server 2005 with Service Pack 2 (32-bit or 64-bit). Q. Can you associate multiple Monitoring servers with a single Monitoring Database? A. Yes. You can associate multiple monitoring servers with a single monitoring database on a seperate computer. Q. Can one Monitoring Server serve multiple pools, and approximately how many users can a single Monitoring Server scale to? A. Yes. A single Monitoring Server can serve up to 200,000 users. If you have multiple pools that total less than 200,000 users, you can associate all these pools with a single Monitoring Server. Q. What is the default retention period for the Monitoring server data? The default data retention for both the QoE data and the Call Detail Records is 60 days (i.e. anything after 60 days get’s purged).Additional Information
- Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 – Deploying Monitoring Server Guide (download from the list)
- Microsoft TechNet – Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Monitoring (Feature Description)
- Microsoft TechNet – Archiving and Monitoring for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (Infrastructure Description)
- Microsoft TechNet – Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Deploying Monitoring Server (Deployment Steps)
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[...] high-level information about the OCS 2007 R2 Monitoring role: OCS 2007 R2 Monitoring Role FAQ (InsideOCS [...]
[...] Note: If you are deploying the OCS 2007 R2 Monitoring Role, there is an updated (Jan 2010) post with answers to key questions about deployment: see OCS 2007 R2 Monitoring Role FAQ. [...]