Sample Planning Worksheets

Preparing Your Network Infrastructure for Windows 2000

The chapter "Preparing Your Network Infrastructure for Windows 2000"in this book provides recommendations for documenting your current network infrastructure. It also helps you to identify the areas of the network infrastructure, such as servers, routers, and network services, that you might need to upgrade or modify before deploying Windows 2000.

The areas of your current network environment that you need to document to prepare your network for deploying Windows 2000 are as follows:

Hardware and software
Network infrastructure
File, print, and Web servers
Line-of-business applications
Directory services architecture
Security

You should thoroughly document the following hardware-related items:

Routers.
Printers.
Modems.
Other hardware, such as redundant array of independent disks (RAID) and Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) server hardware.
Basic input/output system (BIOS) settings.
Driver versions and other software and firmware information.

Your software inventory should include:

All applications found on all computers.
Version numbers (or date and time stamp data) of dynamic link libraries associated with these applications
Service packs that have been applied to the operating system or applications.

Also document network configurations for servers and client computers. This information, which can be located under Network options in Control Panel, includes:

Identification
Services
Protocols
Adapters
Bindings
Internet Protocol addresses

You need to document:

The logical organization of your network
Name and address resolution methods
Configuration of services used
The location of network sites
The available bandwidth between sites

You also need to aggregate much of this information to create physical and logical network diagrams, which you can use to discuss before and after images of the network with others. For more information about important technical issues to document, see "Preparing Your Network Infrastructure for Windows 2000" in this book.