Zero Touch Provisioning Deployment Feature Team Guide

This section describes the focus of the six role clusters during the Planning phase. It also describes considerations to plan before beginning the installation of ZTP. Figure 4 illustrates the Planning phase of ZTP installation.

Figure 4. Planning for ZTP installation
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	Roles and Responsibilities
	Defining Strategies and Objectives
	Defining Requirements for ZTP
	Testing Pre-Deployment

Roles and Responsibilities

The six role clusters from the MSF Team Model participate in the Planning phase of the initiative. Table 3 lists the clusters' roles and defines the focus areas for each. For more information on MSF Team Model role clusters, see http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/msf/default.mspx.

Table 3. Roles and Responsibilities During the Planning Phase

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Defining Strategies and Objectives

Before you deploy ZTP, you should develop a deployment strategy based on your requirements and objectives. You should then incorporate this strategy into your plans. Defining a deployment strategy includes the following activities:

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Defining Requirements for ZTP

An important first step in planning your ZTP deployment is defining precisely the functions your provisioning system must perform and translating them into a requirements definition. A requirements definition describes required provisioning system behavior and the technology strategies for implementing it. It also includes any additional requirements for the deployment project, such as special expertise needed on the Deployment team and user training that will be required to deploy, maintain, and use the provisioning system. You should consider both the current technical environment and the projected usage pattern of the system in developing your requirements definition.

Environment

As part of the preparation for defining requirements, you should conduct a survey of the current technical environment—the network, technologies, and business solutions with which ZTP must integrate. You then use this survey as you plan strategies for deploying the system into the existing environment. The basic tasks for a network survey are as follows:

After you have performed these assessments, you must determine whether any additions or changes to the current environment will be necessary to deploy ZTP. This also involves reviewing the hardware and software requirements.

Usage Patterns

Another important aspect of assessing requirements involves predicting usage patterns for ZTP. You make this prediction based on the type of users (usually defined by job function or group membership), number of users, and where they are located on the network. Using this information for system capacity planning ensures that the system will be able to support its projected load. In addition, for network planning, this process ensures that there is adequate communication among the various components of the system.

For each service of Zero Touch Provisioning, you should make projections for the following usage patterns:

You should consider this information when creating your system design so that you adopt the right strategies for ensuring acceptable levels of performance and availability in both the short and long term.

These estimates are also important in developing a preliminary specification for server hardware, which includes the number of servers, the number of processors, and any other hardware that will be required to support your projected usage. During the system pilot test, you should track the actual usage levels and patterns for the various services. You can then use this information to adjust your preliminary projections and hardware requirements based on actual usage.

Security

A security plan is an essential component of your ZTP deployment plan. This topic provides a brief introduction to security planning. ZTP uses your existing network security methods to protect data and transactions. The ZTP portal uses Active Directory and Authorization Manager for authentication. When users log on to the ZTP portal, it passes the information to Active Directory, which authenticates the user account and grants or denies access to features based on the account credentials.

Planning an effective security strategy includes defining the requirements based on your particular network, your security policies, and the ways in which you will use ZTP. As part of your planning, list the security methods and policies already in place, and plan to integrate ZTP with them. You should make any necessary adjustments before beginning the actual deployment.

There are many aspects of security to include in your planning process. To view procedures and best practices, system administrators can use to secure their Windows 2003-based servers and maintain secure operations, see the Microsoft Web site (http://www.microsoft.com). Through effective use of Group Policy, proper patch management, and auditing and intrusion detection tactics, administrators can manage the risk of attack from avoidable malicious code (such as viruses and Trojan horses), unauthorized access, and data theft. To find other valuable information about security planning, search for security planning at the Microsoft Web site.

System Design

Your system design should take into consideration the current technical environment and projected usage patterns. In addition, it should optimize the availability and performance of your system and make it easy to scale up in response to increasing demand. ZTP comprises a set of software components that perform specific functions and that can be deployed on different servers or clusters of servers. This architecture enhances overall system performance, enables you to easily scale up to meet demand for a particular service, and provides failover protection for a cluster. For more information about designing systems for high availability, see "Chapter 18: Ensuring the Availability of Applications and Services" in Windows 2000 Deployment Planning Guide at the Microsoft Web site (http://www.microsoft.com).

Recovery Plan

A recovery plan describes the steps to take to ensure that you can recover your system if a failure occurs. The recovery plan should include planning regular backups and documenting appropriate procedures for restoring data.

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Testing Pre-Deployment

As part of your pre-deployment test process, you should perform both unit testing and system testing on ZTP:

See the section “Stabilizing” for more information about validating installations.

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