Active directory design proposal

Overview

ELearning is an educational software developer that provides software and cloud computing solutions to private and public educational institutions throughout North America and Europe. The organization currently has four major offices located in Vienna, Virginia, San Jose, California and Dublin, Ireland. A sales team of more than a hundred work across the United States and Europe, primarily from their own homes. ELearning has experienced a combination of growth and disaster in the last 3 years and plans to add an additional 130+ employees, including opening a new office in Austin Texas in the next 6 months. To meet these growth challenges, ELearning is in the process of upgrading the network environment from the current ad hoc design, comprised of Windows 2003, 2008 and *NIX systems, to Windows 2012 R2 Active Directory. Steps have already been taken to improve the network infrastructure. The Vienna Virginia location has replaced all 2008 Domain Controllers with Windows 2012 Servers. However, the San Jose and Dublin locations are still running a single Windows 2008 Domain Controller at each site. Currently all server and workstation IP addresses are statically assigned. DNS is hosted on an older generation UNIX server that has been hacked several times due to faulty security. Remote users currently connect via VPN, which has caused numerous security incidents due to missing antivirus software, outdated AV signatures and missing OS patches on workstations and laptops.

Although the Austin location has not officially opened there are six users currently deployed to that location. There are currently no domain controllers or qualified personal to support them at this location. This site needs to be incorporated into the ELearning Active Directory ASAP. Austin users must be able to authenticate and access ELearning Active Directory services. ELearning has recently acquired another company EduTech Inc. The existing EduTech Active Directory Domain needs to be integrated into the existing ELearning Active Directory forest. The ELearning data center is located at the Vienna and Dublin locations. This is where ELearning hosts and maintains its cloud computing services. Due to increased demand for its cloud services ELearning has experienced difficulty getting servers and services deployed in time due to the lack of an efficient and cost-effective deployment process. The current Active Directory is a single domain. It is up to you finish the network design and improve the server infrastructure.

Current Physical Locations
Current Logical Design

Required Proposal Responses

Executive Overview – Provide an executive overview for Infrastructure proposal. How will your proposal help ELearning? What are the key aspects of your design? Why should ELearning select your proposal over your competitors’ proposals?

Develop a Windows Deployment Design and plan an automated client workstation and server installation strategy. This objective can include but is not limited to: images and bare metal/virtual deployment; plan for multicast deployment and plan for Windows Deployment Services (WDS). This solution should enable ELearning to deploy client and server operating systems in a timely and cost-effective manner.