2.2 Performing a Technical Assessment

Your next need is for a technical assessment to review what you already have, identify what you need, and document your requirements.

It is important to note that the technical assessment should be performed at the same time as the business assessment. The two assessments should take no longer than a week to perform, depending on the size and complexity of the organization and its infrastructure.

You need to have a good understanding of the existing infrastructure well before you introduce ZENworks into the environment. In order to do this, you should hold a set of workshops or meetings to obtain the information you need.

The two main outputs from a technical assessment are documentation of your findings and a set of tasks that you need to perform. Information that should be gathered include the following:

  • Which operating systems must be supported?

  • Will the current servers support the ZENworks services?

  • Which database is required and how will this be set up and configured? For more information about database considerations, see Section II, Database Administrator.

  • How many users must be supported by the proposed solution?

  • Will there be support for roaming users?

  • How many offices and sites must the solution support and how many users are at each location?

  • Where are the data centers located?

  • What is the network architecture? Gather details about information such as link speeds.

  • Will the existing servers be leveraged to support the ZENworks infrastructure? If so, you should gather the following software and hardware information:

    • Service pack levels (and whether they meet the minimum requirements for ZENworks as listed in the Primary Server Requirements section of the ZENworks Server Installation).

    • Other software, for example, .NET.

    • CPU and memory requirements (and whether they meet the minimum requirements for ZENworks).

    • IP addressing for all servers and other devices that will be part of the ZENworks infrastructure.

    • Previous versions of ZENworks that might already be hosted.

  • What is the DNS infrastructure?

  • What is the DHCP infrastructure?

  • How should the IP subnet design be handled?

  • Which network access methods (VPN, Access Manager, and so forth) must be supported?

  • Which network infrastructure components and design (DMZ, NAT, and so forth) must be supported?

  • What is the directory services design? Which directory services are being utilized (eDirectory, Microsoft Active Directory, and so forth.) and for what purpose (application support, LDAP, and so forth.)?