Deploying a Microsoft Skype for Business 2015 environment can require multiple servers in Front-End pools and Edge server pools. Load balancing is necessary in this situation to distribute the traffic amongst these servers.

Microsoft Skype for Business 2015 supports two load balancing solutions: DNS load balancing and Hardware Load Balancing (HLB). Hardware load balancers are also required to provide load balancing for the internal and external web services when DNS load balancing is used.

Different load balancing methods cannot be used on the Edge internal and Edge external interfaces, that is, DNS load balancing cannot be used on the Edge internal interface when hardware load balancing is being used on the Edge external interface. Health checking at the LoadMaster ensures that, if one of the servers becomes inaccessible, the load balancer will take the sever offline and automatically re-route and reconnect users to other functioning servers.

We recommend the configuration as depicted in the above diagram. If your configuration differs from the recommended configuration and there are issues deploying the LoadMaster, please contact the local Progress Kemp Support Team for assistance.