Presenting at LyncConf 2014!

I'm excited to say that I'll be presenting two sessions on Lync Enterprise Voice Best Practices at LyncConf14 in Las Vegas.

These sessions will focus on the WHYs behind the HOWs of Enterprise Voice in Lync 2013.  I'll talk about the best ways to manage your dialplans, voice policies, routes and trunk translation rules to provide a consistent, functional and manageable Lync EV deployment.

So, if you're at LyncConf, come check out my session. Otherwise, the only people who will be there will be my fellow Lync "friends" who just want to see me make a fool of myself, and are threatening to bring various fruits and vegetables to fling at me.

Session Details:

Setting up Enterprise Voice is a big project even for seasoned Lync experts. The interplay between dial plans, voice policies, routes, PSTN usages and trunk translation rules can make it complicated to figure out how to start. Come and join Lync MVP Ken Lasko, the creator of the Lync Dialing Rule Optimizer, and learn the WHYs behind the HOWs of configuring Lync Enterprise Voice – including E.164 numbering, extension dialing and least-cost routing - to provide the most flexibility and easiest migration path from legacy PBXs. And of course, this session wouldn’t be complete without a demonstration of the Lync Dialing Rule Optimizer and how it puts all these best practices into play.

Session Date/Time:

Tuesday, February 18 2014 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM

Room: Copperleaf 1

Thursday, February 20 2014 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM

Room: Copperleaf 1

If there's something you'd like to see me talk about in the session, leave a comment below.

Presentation Issues After Moving Lync 2013 Fileshare

Recently, we moved the Lync 2013 file share for an enterprise pool to a new location that was more resilient than the original. Everything seemed to go well, except that file sharing from internal to external users stopped working. Also, Lync 2010 users were suddenly unable to share Powerpoint presentations.  Lync 2013 users seemed fine.

When attempting to view or share a Powerpoint presentation on Lync 2010, the users got the following message:

This slide couldn’t be downloaded. Please contact your support team. Error reason: File not found.

The fact that 2013 clients were unaffected by the Powerpoint presentation is not unusual.  Lync 2013 offloads Powerpoint content rendering to the Office Web App server.  Lync 2010 clients are unable to utilize this feature, and fall back to the original method, which is managed and rendered from within the Lync server itself.

Of course, my first step in troubleshooting is to plug the error message into my favourite search engine. It came up with several different options, mostly dealing with issues with Office Web Apps, which we weren't experiencing. One blog post in particular caught my attention, because it talked about the same issue happening after a file share move:  http://paulbrown.us/blog/2011/11/02/how-to-change-lync-server-file-store-location/.  Incidentally, it appears that the writer (Paul Brown) enjoys sitting on active train tracks in his spare time, which may account for his lack of activity since May 2013.

So, Paul Brown (RIP) managed to solve the issue for Lync 2010, which definitely helped me solve it for 2013.  The key difference between 2010 and 2013 in this case is that the MeetingContent and MeetingFiles virtual directories in Lync 2010 don't exist in 2013.  All that seems to have been rolled into the CollabContent virtual directory in Lync 2013.

When I looked at the advanced settings for the CollabContent virtual directory, the Physical Path still pointed to the old file share location.  I updated the location using the new path in both the Lync Server External Web Site and Lync Server Internal Web Site and repeated this on each server in the affected front-end pool, followed by an IISReset.  This was enough for both file sharing and presentation sharing to function properly for Lync 2010 and 2013 clients.

This is obviously a bug within the Topology Builder/Lync Deployment Wizard, because this should have been changed automatically by running the Deployment Wizard after the topology change to move the file share.

As a final note, if you're planning on sitting on train tracks, make sure to keep an eye out for any oncoming trains, because, well you know, YOU'RE SITTING ON TRAIN TRACKS!

High Processor Utilization on Lync 2013 Front-End Servers

UPDATE (2015-Oct-02): The problem has finally been fixed!  Took nearly 2 years, but here's a link to the KB article. The fix is in the September 2015 CU for Lync Server 2013.  The cause is "because the topology snapshot was recomputed multiple times by the Response Group Service."  Thanks to @sublimeashish for telling me. 

We have a customer who is about to migrate from Lync 2010 to Lync 2013.  They've got a few lightly loaded Lync 2013 Enterprise Edition pools with 3 servers each.  All are running Windows 2008 R2 Standard Edition on VMWare.  All patches are up-to-date.

For inexplicable reasons, some of the servers will suddenly see their processor utilization spike to near 100% for extended periods of time, when their typical utilization is less than 5%. A look at Task Manager shows two instances of the W3WP.exe service (IIS web service) that are consuming large amounts of processor resources.  There are no events in the Event Logs to indicate an issue.

Performing an IISReset on the affected node makes the processor go back to normal, but this is obviously not a real solution.  We opened a ticket with Microsoft PSS, and they confirmed there are others seeing the same thing.  It seems the source of the problem is the "garbage collection" process in the LyncIntFeature and LyncExtFeature application pools in IIS.  Recycling those pools makes processor utilization return to normal (for a while at least).

Microsoft is actively working to resolve the issue, and I will post a permanent solution for all to see as soon as one becomes available.

UPDATE:  Thanks to @dannydpa  on Twitter, it appears the trigger may be Lync topology publishing. I confirmed this by updating the topology and publishing it.  Less than 10 minutes later, all the servers processor utilization spiked.  Recycling the aforementioned apppools resolved the issue.

To help others with this issue, I've created a little Powershell script that will recycle the LyncIntFeature and LyncExtFeature app pools for all Lync servers.  For the script to work, you need to make sure that remote management is enabled on all Lync servers.  On Windows Server 2012, this is on by default, but in Windows 2008 R2, you need to log on locally and run: Enable-PSRemoting -Force before running the script.

$WebPools = (Get-CSService -WebServer).PoolFQDN

ForEach ($Pool in $WebPools)
{
  $PoolMembers = (Get-CSPool $Pool).Computers
  Foreach ($Computer in $PoolMembers)
  {
    Write-Host "Resetting LyncExtFeature and LyncIntFeature app pools on $Computer"
    $Session = New-PSSession -ComputerName $Computer
    Invoke-Command -session $Session -ScriptBlock {Restart-WebAppPool LyncExtFeature}
    Invoke-Command -session $Session -ScriptBlock {Restart-WebAppPool LyncIntFeature}
    Remove-PSSession $Session
  }
}