Exam Essentials

Know the reason for the new design.     Each organization has different reasons for implementing a new design. Learn the reasons through interviews and define the highest priority reason.

Understand special design requirements.     The design could be affected by the following: domain restructuring, application support, planned obsolescence, and the reduction of the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Understand why you should document the administrative control.     The current administrative control over resources flows into the new design and dictates how the Active Directory infrastructure is created.

Understand the effects geographic locations could have on the design.     Different geographic locations could affect the site design as well as the domain design due to geopolitical reasons.

Understand the software requirements.     Software may rely on special hardware, name resolution methods , or network requirements.

Understand the name resolution requirements.     If applications or operating systems require a specific name resolution method, your design has to incorporate that name resolution.

Understand hardware requirements.     Given the operating system and the applications and services running on that operating system, make sure that the current hardware can support the software.

Know what a baseline is.     A baseline documents the current resource usage on a system. This allows you to determine how much a system can support.

Understand the system addressing requirements.     Each protocol has its own addressing capabilities. You need to identify how the systems are getting their addresses so that they can communicate on the network.

Know why you should monitor the network.     Monitoring the network allows you to identify the network traffic that is currently in use on the network and what types of packets are being sent between systems. This also allows you to determine which of the network segments are over consumed.