Lync Application Sharing and Software Firewalls

Quick post on a discovery I made. I setup a complete infrastructure on an Hyper-V host for a customer (co-located at a datacenter), and one of the components of this infrastructure was Lync 2010. Lync is a phenomenal piece of software that allows for full collaboration for an enterprise without using third party services.

After the complete setup, we noticed that external users were not getting a great experience using desktop sharing / application sharing features from within Lync. Upon further investigation, it turned out the firewall was getting slammed (a virtual instance of pfSense on the hyper-v host). It appears that Lync floods the servers with as much udp traffic as configured to allow, and this causes a problem for the pfSense install which uses emulated network cards. My theory is that the software interrupts that are getting triggered for the emulated network card eats up all the cpu time on the guest OS giving it little time to do the routing/natting it needs to accomplish.

We solved this by using a very simple Linux firewall, although I could have easily just moved the pfSense install to a real machine and would have accomplished the same result. I also wonder if using a CentOS based firewall on the Hyper-V host would have solved the problem since it is supported using Hyper-V’s synthetic nics.

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