One of the best guide, which we found very useful is http://policelli.com/Files/Deploying_Lync_Server_2010_Enterprise.pdf.

For setting up the complete Lync Server 2010 environment, we required 4 servers

1. Domain Controller

2. Lync Back End server

3. Lync Front End Server

4. Monitoring /Archieving Server.

As we are setting up the test lab for SharePoint 2010 and Lync 2010 Integration, we didn’t setup the Monitoring/Archieving setup. Now, we require 3 servers, which is not possible.

So we went with a single Windows Server 2008 R2 system with a Single VM created using Hypher-V. Server will act as both Domain Controller and Lync Back end Server. VM is used as Lync Front End Server.

The main points which we learned from our Lync Server 2010 deployment are

1. Require a dedicated SQL Server. Lync 2010 Front End server cannot be acted as SQL Server.

If you try to setup the Topology with the same Front End server as Back end server, you willreceive the error message “FQDN ‘x’ is already in use in this topology”

2. There is no option for specifying the SQL Authentication to connect the Lync Front End server with SQL Server. We need to authenticate the SQL server using Windows authentication.