Documenting Your Current Environment

Documenting your existing network's physical and logical topology, and having a complete and accurate inventory of the hardware and software your organization uses are very important preliminary steps before you begin planning for your Windows 2000 network infrastructure.

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

Microsoft Windows NT® network diagnostic applications such as Network Monitor are useful for documenting your network. Often, original equipment manufacturers offer troubleshooting or configuration software that is ideal for documenting the configuration of equipment and drivers.

You will be doing a considerable amount of planning while you are preparing your network infrastructure for Windows 2000. In "Creating a Deployment Roadmap" earlier in this book, you defined your deployment project scope and selected the Windows 2000 features you wanted to deploy. You also identified technical dependencies of Windows 2000 that might affect your planning, and created a project plan for deployment.

This chapter focuses on preparing your network infrastructure for Windows 2000, but this preparation cannot stand apart from the planning described in other chapters of this book. Whether you are preparing a new network or migrating Windows 2000 into an existing network structure, your planning in the areas of domain restructuring, server upgrades, and infrastructure requirements will determine the specific tasks you need to do to prepare your infrastructure.