Procedures for network/systems analysis and improvements?

dynamik

At my new company, I'm going to be in a position where I'm going to regularly be called into work with other people's networks. The few I've seen so far are pretty nasty (I've already seen multiple companies setup the same domain name on different machines and create the same users on both DCs, etc.). Obviously, I can look at something and tell whether it's a best practice or not. However, I was wondering if there were any comprehensive, methodological guides (or just checklists), that could be used to evaluate an existing network. It seems foolish to just dive in without a plan. TIA.

blargoe

Don't forget about Microsoft's best practice analyzers, they have them for all of their major products (exchange, sql, sharepoint, etc) and the security baseline analyzer. For free tools they're all right.

UnixGuy

In Sun, if we're doing the initial installation, they we're all do according to Sun's EIS (Enterprise installation standards).

If the installation is already done, then we don't put any system under our support unless we apply the latest patches, and we do monthly checkup using Sun standard check list.

darkerosxx

Diane Teare's CCDA book offers some extremely helpful checklists for analysis and design of networks. You have to scan the chapters for them.

malcybood

Cisco have a section on their website about IT best practices that they have used on their own network from the comms perspective.

Main page
Network Systems - Site Resources by Solution Category - Cisco Systems

High Availability LAN homepage
How Cisco IT Achieved a High Availability Enterprise LAN - Site Resources by Solution Category - Cisco Systems

High Availability WAN
Routing and Switching Best Practices: How Cisco IT Achieved a High Availability WAN - Site Resources by Solution Category - Cisco Systems

Branch Office
Branch Office Design Best Practices: How Cisco IT Standardizes Network Designs for Remote Locations - Site Resources by Solution Category - Cisco Systems

I would also second the Diane Teare CCDA book in regard to content, but it depends if you want to fork out for it though.

Slowhand

Congrats on the new job, man.

I can't really tell you much more than what I mentioned in your other thread.

dynamik

Thanks again guys

mgeorge

I personally don't believe that a single network architectural shoe fits all companies feet. You really have to look at the companies business requirements and existing policies to see how you can improve such policies or raise the bar when it comes to setting new business requirement standards.

A lot of companies are thinking "green" lately which involves virtualization, lower power consumption devices in the data center and even simple scripts that can turn off your PoE VoIP telephones after hours to save the company thousands of dollars per year.

As far as procedures go, Google is your best friend. Research is key. There are tons of documents on the web (cisco site, ms site etc..) that show best practices which you can derive your solution from.

Think of improvements as cutting costs and raising the bar (rather it be performance and/or company productivity)

Like for example; I had a contract once where I went into a company whom already had a full time in house IT staff and executives were asking me why particular link from branch office was finicky when it came to VoIP calls. The in house IT staff were calling for higher bandwidth links costing more money (thus the reason for my contract, executives didn't want to pay more), but after research I found that the link had no QoS and also multiple machines in that branch office were sending spam like crazy. After I presented my research and solution to the staff and it was approved, implementation of the solution allowed them to cut cost by lowering the bandwidth of the link and not sacrifice voice quality due to QoS. worked like a charm saving the company over 140 dollars per month close to 1700 a year.

Afterwards, the employees of the branch actually thought the network was faster but in fact link bandwidth was dropped

Well for a few suggestions, you should look into Solarwinds Engineers Toolset for network engineering related stuff (it is expensive but if your work constitutes the purchase of the software, your company may buy it). Also Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer is great for Microsoft related security testing. Wireshark of course is great. If I think of more great programs I'll add to this post.

HeroPsycho

The Best Practices analyzers from Microsoft are good ones as mentioned above. Do some netdiag and dcdiags on domain controllers.

There are quite a few scripts out there that can help, too.

VMware Communities: VMware Healthcheck script

Windows PowerShell: Building Your Own Software Inventory Tool

Powershell script to check free disk spaces for servers - Ying Li(MVP) at myITforum.com

Just a few I've used that I found useful.

bwcarty

Tagging for later

Claymoore

MS Active Directory Topology Diagrammer
http://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?familyid=CB42FC06-50C7-47ED-A65C-862661742764&displaylang=en

MS Group Policy Inventory
Download details: Group Policy Inventory (GPInventory.exe)

+1 for SolarWinds Engineers Toolset