F5 Configuration for OCS R2 Enterprise Edition

Great Blog...a must read: http://voipnorm.blogspot.com/2009/05/f5-configuration-for-ocs-r2-enterprise.html. Also see the F5 documentation for Deploying the BIG-IP LTM with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2:http://www.f5.com/pdf/deployment-guides/f5-ocs-r2-dg.pdf

What’s New in Office Communications Server 2007 R2

The article at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.03.ocsr2.aspx?pr=blog gives an awesome run down of the new features below in R2
Call Delegation
Team Call
Group Chat
Desktop Sharing
Server Applications to Extend Voice and Conferencing
Response Group Service
Outside Voice Control
SIP Trunking
Enhanced Media
Simplified Firewall Configuration for the A/V Edge Server
Archiving, CDR, and QoE Enhancements
Simplified Management

OCS Consolidated Topology wins over Expanded Topology

With the intial release of OCS 2007, Microsoft recommended an Expanded Topology for large scale deployments. Now, with OCS 2007 R2 and the requirement of 64-bit, the recommended configuration is a Consolidated Topology in which all server roles in a pool are collocated on a single computer. Scalability is achieved by adding computers to the pool or perimeter network and load balancing them. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.03.ocsr2.aspx?pr=blog

MaxAudioVideoBitRate Setting for OCS

There is not much guidance on how to set the MaxAudioVideoBitRate. Some are using 512 as the value, then finding video does not work. This particular setting is not expressed kilobits. The article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd637169%28office.13%29.aspx states if you want 512Kbps then you should use 512000 instead of 512 (which you might enter if you assumed the setting is in kilobits). The hexidecimal value is 7d000

Reg export for the 512K example:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator]
"MaxAudioVideoBitrate"=dword:0007d000

Same rules apply for the LiveMeeting MaxAudioVideoBitrate