Infrastructure Planning and Design

This is a quick heads up for some important guides that should be on every system integrators table.

The Infrastructure Planning and Design guides from Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=732

The planning phase on a project is the most important one.

The reason for that, is that you must ensure what the customer actually want to do, and how to meet the requirements. Let’s take the System Center components for example.
Although you can ramble on and install Operations Manager on a single server, this is unlikely very clever to do.

Things to consider prior to deployment:

·         What infrastructure is in place prior to the deployment?

·         Do you have to purchase additional hardware components to meet the requirements?

·         Will this lead to some change management?

·         Who’s involved in this project?

·         Will it involve down time for some (or all) of the production?

·         ETA?

This is just a few points to mention in this context, but the list could go on and on and on.

Read the different guides that are related to the projects you’re working with, and make sure you have considered the most important pitfalls.
Statistically, 8 of 10 IT projects are failing beyond recognition. If you read through the Infrastructure Planning and Design guides, you should be one step closer to a successful project.