Chapter 1 - MCSE 70-297 The assessment stage

Abstract

It is important to assess the environment into which the system is to be deployed, before commencement of the design of any system implementation. Active Directory (AD) has the potential to affect every facet of IT infrastructure and every team involved with IT, even in the largest of enterprises. AD deployments can impact areas, including the physical network topology, network bandwidth and resilience, IP addressing, name resolution hierarchies, administrative procedures, administrative models, and security policies. This chapter explores which aspects of the environment are affected by AD and how to assess whether the IT environment is ready for the deployment of AD or not. The assessment of the technical environment is necessary. This includes an analysis of the current administrative model, service levels, existing hardware and software deployments, and any interoperability issues that need to be considered. The assessment phase then moves onto the area of domain name system (DNS). Versions of Windows operating systems prior to Windows 2000 did not rely upon an understanding of the underlying network topology to function correctly.