Preparing Your Network Infrastructure for Windows 2000

  • Article

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.