What is Central Management Store (CMS) on Microsoft Lync Server 2010?

What is Central Management Store (CMS) on Microsoft Lync Server 2010?

Central Management Store (CMS), which holds information about all the roles and settings in the deployment and it, is newly introduced in Lync Server 2010

CMS replaces the various data stores that were used in OCS. The benefit of this Central Management

Store is that once the topology is defined and published, every installation simply pulls from the defined configuration.

Advantages of CMS:-

Server management centralized, No need to connect server remotely.

 CMS replaced OCS Console. This minimizes administrator input and allows automated deployment.

Certificates are requested and deployed and the fact that the Edge server role can now be centrally managed.

The administrator no longer has to connect remotely to that server to manage it locally.

Available flavour of Lync Server 2010

1.       Lync  2010 Standard Edition (Runs on single server)

2.      Lync 2010 Enterprise Edition.

Like many Microsoft server applications, Lync has a Standard and an Enterprise Edition.

The Standard Edition is fully functional but runs on a single server, using a SQL Express back-end database. It is still supported by other roles, such as the Edge, Monitoring, and Archiving roles, which would still run on other physical server hardware. The supporting roles don’t have a definition of Standard or Enterprise; they simply support the deployed front-end servers. The Enterprise Edition allows for higher availability and more scalability of the roles to support organizations with hundreds of thousands of users. Both versions of the software can be installed only on a Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 64-bit operating system (OS) and must be installed on the full GUI version of those operating systems rather than the Server Core version.

How Lync Server 2010 Central Management Store (CMS) look like?