What is Lync Topology - An Introduction

What is a topology?

In Office Communications Server 2007, setting up a deployment could prove tricky.  Designing the deployment took careful preparation and each machine then needed to be setup and configured.  The administrator would have to go to each machine and physically install specific pieces, then change settings to make everything work.  This was a real pain, and we realized that.
Ease of deployment was one of the highest priority pieces for Lync Server 2010 and resulted to dramatic changes in our product infrastructure.  The entire administration feature was completely rewritten for Lync Server 2010 due to these changes.  The key behind this is a critical piece called the Central Management Server.  The Central Management Server does a lot of things that I will get to explaining one day or another, but the most important thing it does is store a list of all the servers involved in the deployment and what each of them does.

The full post is here.

Source: MSDN[Joe Calev]