Chapter 6. The Physical Design and Developing the Pilot

The physical design of the Windows 2003 infrastructure defines many important elements, including server placement, network services, Time Services, file and print services, and client services. Although the physical design follows the logical design chronologically in this book, they don't necessarily have to occur in that order. In fact, they will likely occur in parallel with each other. For instance, design of the replication topology was presented in Chapter 5, "Active Directory Logical Design," but it contains many elements, such as domain controller (DC) and Global Catalog (GC) server placement. If your design team has separate teams for designing the physical and logical spaces, they must communicate with each other.

Having identified the Windows 2003 features that will benefit your organization (Chapter 1, "What's New in Windows Server 2003 and in ProLiant Architecture and Tools"), determined the migration path and identified the business reasons and justification for the migration (Chapter 3, "Migration Planning: Business and Technical"), conducted the assessment of the logical and physical infrastructure (Chapter 4, "Assessment of the Enterprise"), and designed the logical infrastructure (Chapter 5), the physical design can be developed, followed by conducting the pilot . This chapter contains a section, "The Pilot Plan," that describes elements of designing and running a pilot program that becomes the first stage of the migration. That section also includes a case study from the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) on how it conducted its pilot.