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Chapter 1 • Using Windows Server 2003 Planning Tools and Documentation
After you have a high-level understanding of your company’s organizational structureand computing needs, you should inventory the hardware and software that is already inplace. In a small office environment, you can accomplish this by simply taking a walk todetermine the physical layout of network cables, routers, and the like. In a medium- tolarge-sized enterprise network, you will probably want to rely on automated inventorytools such as Microsoft’s Systems Management Server (SMS) or a third-party equivalent.Take as detailed of an inventory as possible, including the hardware configuration of serverand workstation machines as well as vendor names and the version numbers of the oper-ating system and business applications the systems are running.You can use a network analyzer, such as the Network Monitor utility built into theWindows Server 2003 operating system or the more full-featured version of NetworkMonitor included in SMS, to create a baseline of the current utilization of your networkbandwidth. If this utilization is already near capacity, you can use this baseline to justify andplan upgrades to your network infrastructure (moving from 10MB Ethernet to 100MBEthernet, for example).