Question

Please design a server infrastructure that includes a server operating system and an Active Directory environment. Be sure to address all of the requirements above. Your plan should include at least the following

• Number, type, and approximate cost of actual servers
• Storage (RAID type, capacity, backup plan)
• Operating system for the server(s)
• Active Directory installation plans, user account structure, departments, security permissions
• Access to shared resources (files, printers, etc.)
• Access to critical applications (medical, office, email, any others)
• Specific plan for backing up critical data (medical application database, user file areas if any, user email)
• Virus protection plans for the company

Answer 1

For creation of the infrastructure, you must require more than 3 servers in which you will have active directory domain service as well as the DNS for resolving the hostname. Similarly, you need DHCP server as well to provide IP addresses to the client machine. So, the servers must be powerful enough to serve request and must ensure that you have high availability and fault tolerance. You need to install Windows server 2012R2 along with Windows 2010 client OS. So, the overall setup cost might take upto $7000 in total.

Coming to the storage, you should use RAID 6, such that it provides high availability to your data and your data should not be lost at any cost. You should take incremental backup of your data and put it in some other location such that you can restore your data during crisis.

You need to install the ADDS service and create your domain such that domain users can be created under the Active Directory users and computers and can easily apply policies over to the users. It is always better to have Organisational Units to mange the user in a easy way.

Yes, you should have printers and shared drives using the Distributed file systems where users can able to put data in a shared location and also able to use the printers.

For accessing the critical applications, there should be a secured connection such that traffics from outside cannot come to the infrastructure. For that you need to apply security measures and allow only trusted users to access those application.

The data should be backed up on a daily basis using the incremental backup method and then store those data on a separate location away from that region. This will help you to restore data during disaster. All data from database as well as from the application must be backed up and stored.

For virus protection plan, first thing you need to do is setting up a firewall for the infrastructure and then antivirus application to be installed on every machine in order to detect viruses.