| Before the design of any system implementation may commence, first one must assess the
environment into which that system is to be deployed.This argument holds true especially for
Active Directory (AD). Active Directory has the potential to affect every facet of your IT
infrastructure and every team involved with IT, even in the largest of enterprises. Active
Directory 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, to name but a few.
This first chapter helps you to better understand which aspects of your environment are
affected by Active Directory, and how to assess whether your IT environment is ready for the
deployment of Active Directory.
We start with the assessment of the technical environment.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.
Next we move onto the server environment and analyze the current domain model,
domain controller (DC) and other infrastructure (including WINS and DHCP) placement
and numbers, as well as creating a detailed inventory of all servers installed, including file,
print, and Web servers.
The assessment phase then moves onto the area of DNS. Here we analyze the existing
DNS implementation and its hierarchy, and assess whether it is ready to support Active
Directory.
Finally, the physical network must be scrutinized.Versions of Windows operating systems
prior to Windows 2000 did not rely upon an understanding of the underlying network
topology to function correctly.This is not the case with Active Directory—information can
be replicated between domain controllers in an efficient and timely fashion only if both the
network topology is understood and Active Directory is configured to use that same topology. |
