Planning & Design Engagement

In the 'Planning & Design' engagement, Hosting Controller engineers will gather and analyze your requirements, discuss different options, and prepare a 'Design Document' for you. The Design Document will incorporate all your requirements and will be prepared according to Microsoft's latest best practices and will be detailed enough for you to give to any team qualified in such tasks to follow step by step for commissioning of the whole project. The design document will have the following structure:

Executive Summary

Overview

Microsoft applications

Project timelines

Policy decisions

Number of copies of each data item

Usable capacity available to each user

Site resilience

Security policies

Deployment details

Major assumptions and their rationale

Initial capacity dimensioned

Total initial hardware requirements

Scalability points Optional services requiring development

Integration requirements

Initial capacity dimensioned

Operational requirements

Suggested Hardware

Models and configurations: SuperMicro, DELL, HP, IBM, Cisco etc. with budgetary prices

Capacity Planning

Assumptions about user behavior Redundancy Requirements
Resilience Requirements
Dimensioning Sheets going from
usage statistics to required resources
Required Hardware Resources BoQ Total number of servers

RAM

CPU

Storage

Total Networking Ports

Bandwidth

Required data center resources for suggested hardware

Space

Power

Cooling

Bandwidth

Public IP Addresses

Required Software Licenses BoQ Dimensioning Sheets with working ‘What-If’ scenarios all based on Microsoft best practices

Change in input capacities to see effect on resource usage

Change in behavior assumptions to see effect on resource usage

Decide different scalability options

Deployment Configuration

Site wise hardware distribution

Virtual Machines Specifications on each server

Applications and their roles

Mapping of application roles on virtual machines

Networking Diagram

A diagram showing the physical connections between servers and between servers and the router. Suggested VLAN configurations and details of which Ethernet ports in each server are connected to which VLAN for

Service Delivery and client access plane

Data Replication among software applications plane

Management and monitoring plane

The diagram will also show requirements for Public IPs and will show all private IP end-points and how they are connected on different subnets.

Security Diagram

Showing basic firewall configuration mentioning which applications are on public IPs, which ones are in DMZ and which ones are strictly behind firewall and on private IPs. The section will also show how administrators will get VPN access to access the end points over private IPs.

Redundancy Diagram

A diagram showing redundancy available for each application function

Data Redundancy Diagram Showing how client data is replicated to keep extra copies.

Database Redundancy Diagram Showing how the database server is arranged into a cluster.

Web Server Redundancy Diagram Showing how multiple web servers are configured.

Other Applications Redundancy Diagrams Showing the redundancy available in every other application function and mentioning if it is configured in load sharing or hot-standby modes.

Usage Scenarios

Client Access Call flows showing typical ways clients will use the services

Load Balancing Flows showing how the load will be distributed onto multiple application server instances

Provisioning Call flows showing how different users (Service Providers Administrators, Enterprise Administrators, End Users) will access different types of GUIs to provision resources required.

High Availability Scenarios

Graphical representations of how are the services going to stay continuously available during different failure scenarios.
Software Failures

Web Server

Database

DNS Server

Other Application Servers like CAS Server, Witness Server, and Edge Transport Server etc.

Client Data e.g. MBX Servers

Hardware Failures

Individual Hard Disk

Server

Network

data center

Service Monitoring

This section will manage options to monitor different aspects of the complete end to end service delivery. Different tools will be suggested here.

Scalability

Options to scale beyond the initial dimensioned capacity. This section will mention the points where initial hardware resources will get consumed and more hardware needs to be added. The section will mention all scalability points up to the maximum dimensioned capacity.

Level 1 Support Use Cases

This section will mention the basic support use cases for both hardware and software incidences. The section will mention basic SOPs on how to handle each of them.

Migration

An optional section mentioning details of migration. The structure depends on each individual case. Typical migration concerns are

Migration of user identity

Migration of data

There may be coexistence scenarios where two or more deployments need to coexist in an interim phase.