Updating Skype for Business Front End Servers

Following on from my previous post, performing an In Place upgrade, I thought I would put together an overview of the simplified pool update process.

The Skype for Business Server management experience has introduced some very useful commands and processes. Firstly, the In-Place upgrade process itself, which introduced you to the Smart Setup and the Start-CsPool command, all which on their own reduce the operational loads significantly!

In this post, I will walk you through the simplified process of performing maintenance on your Skype for Business Enterprise Edition Front End Servers.

Now to summarise the overall process, I will let these two images do all the talking, on the left is the Lync Server 2013 Patching Process, on the right the same for Skype for Business Server 2015

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Lync Backup Service Cmdlets fail to run

I have recently been supporting a fault that a friend of mine (new to Lync) was experiencing in his lab environment but thought it would be a useful blog post!

The configuration was as follows;

  • 1x Lync Server 2013 Standard Edition, deployed on host 1 – LYNCSE01.domain.local
  • 1x Lync Server 2013 Standard Edition, deployed on host 2 – LYNCSE02.domain.local
  • 1x Office Web Apps, associated with both of the aforementioned pools – OWA01.domain.local
  • Clients homed on each pool connected successfully and consuming all communication modalities

The next step in his environment was for Pool Pairing to be configured, which is a great new addition to Lync Server 2013.

The topology can be see below, published successfully:

 Untitled

The next steps, as per the post installation ‘to do list’ were to:

Update Lync Server with the changes defined in the topology by running local Setup on each server in the following list.
Server FQDN: LYNCSE01.domain.local, Pool FQDN: LYNCSE01.domain.local
Server FQDN: LYNCSE02.domain.local, Pool FQDN: LYNCSE02.domain.local

Run the Invoke-CsBackupServiceSync cmdlet to ensure conferencing data is replicated.
PoolFqdn LYNCSE01.domain.local

Invoke-CsBackupServiceSync –PoolFqdn LYNCSE01.domain.local

PoolFqdn LYNCSE02.domain.local

Invoke-CsBackupServiceSync –PoolFqdn LYNCSE02.domain.local

Setup was ran on both standard edition servers, no errors there – but when it came to running the command ‘Invoke-CsBackupSyncService’, the following error was presented

pairedpools_backupcmdletfail1

Once quick look at the services running on the machine would identify the problem, the LyncServerBackupService  was not running. Starting this allowed the command to be run:

pairedpools_backupcmdletfail6

Next up, confirming the status of the pool pair. Running the command ‘Get-CsBackupServiceStatus -PoolFQDN LYNCSE01.domain.local’ now presented a new error:

You don’t have required permission to perform Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) call to backup service instance on computer

One key point to remember, that is often overlook, is to always check the ‘to do list’ following topology changes being published. If this had been done, the account being used to deploy Lync would have been a member of RTCUniversalServerAdmins (this is also identified as a requirement when running Get-CsBackupServiceconfiguration (see below))

pairedpools_backupcmdletfail

Once added to the RTCUniversalServerAdminsGroup, the cmlets were successful ran, and the ready state was output!

pairedpools_backupcmdletfail3

pairedpools_backupcmdletfail4