Developing Lab Guidelines

It is recommended that you develop and implement guidelines for how team members should use the lab. Make the guidelines easy to remember and follow, with the intent to clarify rather than to dictate. Identify and document the following:

Roles and responsibilities.   Identify who is responsible for tasks such as scheduling lab use and performing backups.

Facilities and guidelines for special types of tests.   For example, identify the domains and configurations team members should use for testing the migration process.

Change control guidelines for the lab.   Identify who is allowed to make configuration changes. Define the approval process for change requests. For example, identify who can make schema changes and who should be notified when a change is made. Define the documentation required whenever someone makes a change to the lab.

Initialization procedures for servers.   Document the steps for installing, configuring, and populating domain controllers and member servers. Include DNS settings if you do not use the DNS built into Windows 2000.

Lab restore procedures for testing rollout.   Document the steps for restoring domain controllers to their original state and for refreshing user account data. Document all server configurations. Test the refresh process before you begin migration testing.

Restore procedures for client computers.   If you plan to rebuild client computers frequently to test various configurations, document the tools to be used to quickly restore the computer to a known initial state. For example, you might want to use RIS.

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