Typically when restarting services in Windows most people use the Services snap-in or the net start/stop commands, but the OCS Management console offers a simple way to stop and start services in a pre-defined order.
I investigated the behavior of this to learn what the preferred order or service dependencies may be (if at all) within OCS. Unlike Exchange Server, where a number of services are dependant on others on the local system, none of the core OCS services are dependant on other core services. So technically there does not appear to be a required order to stop and start services, but here’s what the console does.
Shutdown
OCS 2007 Standard Edition Front-End Server
- Office Communications Server Front-End
- Office Communications Server IM Conferencing
- Office Communications Server Telephony Conferencing
- Office Communications Server Monitoring Agent
- Office Communications Server Web Conferencing
- Office Communications Server Audio/Video Conferencing
- Office Communications Server Application Sharing
- Office Communications Server Response Group
- Office Communications Server Conferencing Attendant
- Office Communications Server Conferencing Announcement
- Office Communications Server Outside Voice Control
The Office Communications Server Application Host service is not automatically stopped as part of this programmed sequence, but each of the four built-in OCS application services are. This is most likely incase additional custom application are deployed on the Front-End server which would rely on the Application Host running. When rebooting the server that service can be left to be stopped by the shutdown process, but if rebooting all OCS services manually for some testing it wouldn’t hurt to manually restart the Application Host if desired.
Startup
One might assume that when issuing the command to start all stopped services from the management console that the exact opposite behavior would be seen. But oddly enough it’s the same exact order during services startup. Other than the aforementioned Application services (which would be assumed to be still running since the console didn’t issue a stop request to it) non of the OCS services have a configured dependency on any other OCS services. There are dependencies on the WMI service, but since there are no inter-dependencies among the OCS services they can really be started/stopped in generally any order. But following the order that the management console was programmed to do is best practice.
And although the console-based Startup routine does not issue a start control, because of the set dependency when the Application Sharing service is started the Application Host service will automatically be started by the Windows Server host.
