Complete the planning phase
Before permanently moving on from this chapter, wrap up the planning phase. This involves reviewing the purposes, goals, and design portions. Make sure that they are all completely aligned; the purposes must clearly detail a vision for the completed project, the goals must clearly detail the way that the purposes will be fulfilled, and the design must clearly detail the way that technology will implement the goals. Once these three conditions have been satisfied, the planning portion of the master project document should be locked down and no further changes are allowed.
When planning is complete, gather vendor quotes and start acquiring the equipment, software, and licensing that make up your design.
Sample project – planning and design
After much research and several meetings, Techstra's administrator in charge of designing the project has made changes to the goals section and has laid out a design section that details the software and physical components to be purchased with the idea to scale out later as necessary. Because the MAP scan revealed that a single host can handle the projected load and the cost of licensing a three node cluster turned out to be prohibitive, the hardware design has been reduced accordingly. Previous sections were adjusted to match. The next section shows the results of the hardware plan. Once this section is complete, the entire planning portions are reviewed and finalized.
Sample project – hardware
In this project, we have the following hardware components:
Hosts (2):
- Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (Standard Edition, 2 licenses per host)
- Dual eight-core CPUs
- 64 GB RAM
- 2 x 300 GB mirrored internal 7.2k hard drives
- 5 x 1 GbE network adapters
Network Attached Storage: general-purpose computer:
- Windows Server 2012 with iSCSI target
- One dual-core CPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 6 x 300 GB 10k hard drives in RAID-5 array
- 3 x 1 GbE network adapters
Switching hardware:
- 2 x 24-port layer-2 switches