Access Edge Servers can be set up in a consolidated topology or an expanded topology. The real difference between the two is that the services of Access Edge Servers, Web components, and audio/visual (A/V) components all exist on one server that shares all these roles. In an expanded topology, there are three potential configurations:

And, at remote larger locations or secondary data centers, here are the possible configurations:

What this means in federation is that you have only one set of servers to deal with—one load-balanced array rather than a set of servers for each role.

However, make sure you understand that you can locate Conferencing Web servers and Audio/Video Conferencing servers wherever you want—in the same data center locally or dispersed to different locations to be located with other pools closer to users. But you can have only one farm of Access Edge Servers, at your primary site.

To enable federation in an enterprise, do the following:

Why define a global property? As with many settings, the exception is much easier to deal with than defining the multitude of options separately. This configuration affects all default routes for all pools. If we need an exception, it can be defined locally.