Weaknesses of Our Lab

Finally, let's take a moment to analyze where our lab is failing us. Most glaringly, we should note that we have no real normal operation of major services. Sure we have an email server, but it is not actually sending and receiving email. While the sending and receiving of email is not important in and of itself, in production we have a DMZ where there are mail relays. We have can't really replicate the normal operation between these systems. So we are really still left to simply double and triple-checking our work on things like this, and performing some very basic connectivity testing to ensure that we don't fat-finger a rule that tears down LDAP lookups from the inbound mail relay to our domain controller.

Secondly, we pointed out earlier that our server and network hardware does not exactly mirror our production hardware. I'm not going to cover all the specifics about that since we covered it at the beginning, but like I said we did a good job while keeping within a small budget.

Lastly, we haven't done a very good job of mimicking the stress level of our production environment. Although we will be able to see when a new piece of software simply doesn't work properly, we will not be able to see when some new firewall setup kills our bandwidth. This is a problem that is addressable though. There are benchmarks available for just about everything, and many are free. So if we want to load our switch up and test the bandwidth through our firewall, or load up our Exchange server there is usually a tool we can use. This does not give us the real-world situation in which there are load patterns throughout the day occurring naturally, but it will enable us to perform some stress testing over a confined period of time. I only mention this as a weakness of our lab since I have not covered it in this guide, and it is something important to think about. But in reality, this is part of the testing you should be doing in the lab, not part of the setup of the lab. You will need to look around for these testing applications, but I'll provide some good ones for applications you might be supporting in your environment:

• Apache Bench
• HTTPerf
• HTTP_load
• SQL-Bench
• MySQL Super Smack
• DBench
• NetBench
• Exchange 2003
• Guide to testing a variety of MS services and applications

Bibliography
Microsoft TechNet: Windows Server 2003 Deployment Guide
Microsoft TechNet: Windows Server 2003 Deployment Guide- Planning, Testing, and Piloting Deployment Projects
Windows 2000 Resource Kit: Building a Windows 2000 Test Lab
Windows 2000 Resource Kit: Responding to Operations Master Failures
How can I delete a failed Domain Controller object from Active Directory? by Daniel Petri
Microsoft Knowledgebase: Using Ntdsutil.exe to transfer or seize FSMO roles to a domain controller
Windows 2000 Resource Kit: NTDSUtil.exe command reference
Microsoft Knowledgebase: Using Ntdsutil.exe to transfer or seize FSMO roles to a domain controller
Microsoft Knowledgebase: Error Message: DSA Object Cannot Be Deleted
Tek-Tips: Insufficient Rights to delete the domain controller object
Microsoft Knowledgebase: Cannot Delete a Computer Account for the Domain Controller in Windows 2000
Microsoft Knowledgebase: How to remove data in Active Directory after an unsuccessful domain controller demotion
Microsoft Knowledgebase: How to recover the information store on Exchange 2000 Server or Exchange Server 2003 in a single site