A week or so ago, I was in the middle of deploying an AudioCodes Mediant 800 at a remote site.  The device had the Lync SBA installed as well.  We were trying to get the SBA to work with our Lync 2013 deployment.  This is just to document the issues we ran into.

***NOTE: The gateway must be updated to version 6.6 prior to upgrading the SBA.

First, an SBA that is based on Lync 2010 cannot be an SBA for a Lync 2013 Front-end.  This should make sense as a backup registrar must be on the same platform as the Front-end it is backing up (i.e. 2010 and 2010 or 2013 and 2013).  Sadly, I battled this way longer than I should have before this realization hit me.

Second, AudioCodes does provide an update to the SBA for Lync 2013.  If you have a valid support account with AudioCodes, you can get it here.

Once you have downloaded the updated image (warning, this took me 3-4 hours due to AudioCodes restricting speeds, I was on a 100Mb link), you must perform the SBA recovery procedure with the USB drive that AudioCodes provides.

Now, when I was doing this, I ran into an issue that has now been fixed.  The image that had been available didn’t have the right network drivers.  Therefore, the SBA would never detect the NICs.  Make sure that the image you are using has a modified date of 2/8/2013 or newer.

After the image has been updated, run through the wizard as per usual.

I battled this for hours and hours and had to call into AudioCodes in the middle of the night to get the driver situation fixed.

I’m chalking alot of this up to being a bit bleeding edge with a deployment but these challenges are what make being an engineer fun (when viewed in hindsight).