Microsoft Lync 2010 Performance Report

The Microsoft voice solution is a competitive offering however not as well accepted or trusted as long lived voice solutions such as Cisco, Avaya, Shoretel, etc. When dealing with a client that has interest in deploying with Microsoft Communication Server their primary concern is reliability as compared to a traditional PBX.  There has already been benchmark tests to confirm Microsoft prowess in the Unified Communication arena:

FYI Stress Test results below:

Miercom, who specializes in voice testing, has produced a glowing report of Lync 2010’s performance in lab tests. Highlights from the report:

Performance Verified Report
Microsoft Lync 2010 is the first Unified Communications product to pass the SIP Torture and Attrition Test with Miercom by achieving a record 4 million SIP calls complete without error.

The delivery rate with sustained operation without error is the highest capacity test applied to any Unified Communications / IP PBX product we have tested to date.

Performance - Microsoft Lync successfully passed voice and video Quality of Experience (QoE) tests under heavily loaded and degraded network conditions. Even with significant jitter and a packet loss percentage in excess of 5% the voice and video quality of the Lync client with High Definition Video was superb.

Bottom Line - Microsoft Lync 2010 is a resilient, scalable, feature rich Unified Communications System. Microsoft Lync 2010 should be in the short list of top three to consider for enterprises communications infrastructure upgrades.

(comes out to an average of ~13K calls/hour)

This is even more impressive in that these tests were run on a *single virtualized Lync Standard Edition server* with 4Gb RAM on a Hyper-V host with four other VM’s, and not a Lync pool with dedicated hardware.

The Microsoft Lync solution is a complete voice solution for clients offering the same features such as Call Park, switchboard console (Attendant Console), voice mail (Exchange UM), response groups service and auto attendants.  The Microsoft Lync solution is fully integration compatible with a wide array of on-site PBX vendors and may also be used with PBX bypass and direct PSTN connection with future wave SIP trunking providers.

The Lync solution resonates well with customers in the aspect that it is a familiar feel and integrates with most client current Line of Business (LOB) applications:  Outlook, SharePoint, Outlook Web Access (OWA), Dynamics, and most other Microsoft products.  The end users for the most part are already familiar with many other IM technologies and Lync brings that look and feel to a fully functional VoIP offering.

As of wave 14 of the Microsoft Communications Server family, Microsoft Lync is fully supported in virtualization deployments with VMware, Citrix XenServer, and Hyper-V.  There are a wide array of vendors—Polycom, Snom, Altigen, and more that offer headset and handsets that add a familiar look and feel to a Microsoft voice solution that is indistinguishable from other PBX phone systems.

The Microsoft offering unlike other vendors offerings is a software based solution and with that comes the advantage of not having an vendor specific, proprietary hardware requirements.  The Lync software runs on top of Windows Server operating systems in either physical or virtual workloads.  This trumps other vendors in being able to upgrade and keep competitive feature sets not bound to hardware limitations.  As customers embrace the Microsoft Communications Server technology the power behind a software driven solution will become more realized.

Sean V.
Sr. Solutions Architect
En Pointe Technologies