The persona is a fundamental concept in the network readiness calculations; the more accuracy we can come up with while defining it, the closer to reality our estimations will be. A persona represents a category of users with a defined set of usage behavior and feature set for each of the following Lync communication modalities:

Persona profiles can be configured through a set of predefined standard usages (high, medium, and low), which are based on the following concurrency percentages:

What do these percentages mean? Let's take the medium usage for PSTN audio as an example. This value is set at 10 percent. This means (assuming 100 users with such persona profiles in a given site) that the tool will calculate for 10 simultaneous active PSTN calls at any given time.

Persona definitions can be fully customized for each modality. In our test scenario, we will be using standard usage definitions.

How to do it…

Browse to the persona sheet in the Bandwidth Calculator tool. You will notice some predefined persona definitions. Delete them and replace them with the following:

Note

The image is split into two parts for better readability.

Let's review the rationale for our persona definitions:

• Standard user: We have set medium or typical usage for all modalities. This persona has a low (10 percent) remote users percentage. This parameter indicates how many users are to be considered remote. When a user is remote, they will connect through the Lync edge servers from the Internet and the network impact will differ.
• Heavy conference user: We have set low usages for IM, presence, and peer-to-peer modalities, and high usages for conferencing modalities. We have also set the Lync 2013 Stereo Audio modality to 2 percent (the valid range is from 0 percent to 3 percent). Stereo audio is used by Lync Room System devices. We have also set video quality to best. Multiparty HD video in Lync is supported but has a greater impact on network bandwidth.
• Mobile user: Parameters are substantially similar to those assigned to the standard user persona, with the exception of the remote users parameters set at 80 percent. This means we expect a very high percentage of users for the site that is not connected to the WAN network, instead being Internet-based users connecting through the Edge server.

  Note

  The Lync mobile client is always an external client, and it connects via the reverse proxy and leverages the Edge servers for media traffic. This is applicable irrespective of whether the mobile client connects through an internal corporate Wi-Fi network.