Updated Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides

astorrs

These are a great (and free!) resource from Microsoft detailing "their" vision of IT infrastructure design. Worth a read (or at least a skim) if you're planning on implementing any of the components.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AD3921FB-8224-4681-9064-075FDF042B0C&SAMI_CAMPAIGN_NAME=IPD091608RTM_IPDDL&displaylang=en

The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) guides are the next version of Windows Server System Reference Architecture. The guides in this series help clarify and streamline design processes for Microsoft infrastructure technologies, with each guide addressing a unique infrastructure technology or scenario.

Infrastructure Planning and Design guides share a common structure, including:

- Definition of the technical decision flow through the planning process.
- Listing of decisions to be made and the commonly available options and considerations.
- Relating the decisions and options to the business in terms of cost, complexity, and other characteristics.
- Framing decisions in terms of additional questions to the business to ensure a comprehensive alignment with the appropriate business landscape.

These guides complement product documentation by focusing on infrastructure design options.

Each guide leads the reader through critical infrastructure design decisions, in the appropriate order, evaluating the available options for each decision against its impact on critical characteristics of the infrastructure. The IPD Series highlights when service and infrastructure goals should be validated with the organization and provides additional questions that should be asked of service stakeholders and decision makers.

IPD consists of the following downloadable packages:

- Infrastructure Planning and Design Series Introduction
- Internet Information Services 7.0
- Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5
- Selecting the Right NAP Architecture
- Selecting the Right Virtualization Technology
- System Center Operations Manager 2007
- System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008
- Windows Deployment Services
- Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Domain Services
- Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services
- Windows Server Virtualization (for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1)

bertieb

Excellent mate, thanks for posting