Hello everyone,
I am looking for some best practice hints (most preferably a document or guide) how to prepare domain member servers in a local staging location before shipping the servers into their final remote location.
The idea in short: we have a staging area at one of the locations, where there is a Domain controller serving the domain. So member servers can be joined to the domain at the staging location. We install the applications (Lync, Exchange, Sharepoint, TMG, etc.) here, and after the configuration the server is shot down, and sent to the remote location. At the remote location the server is connected to the network, powered on, and it should work out of the box, with very minimal post-stage administration.
Issues I see sofar:
1) servers will not receive their final IP, due to the staging area having different IP subnet than the final IP network. This may not be an issue, IPs can be re-assigned after shipped to the final destination, DC discovery works regardless of IP config.
Applications that depend on the value of IP address must be reconfigured after the final IP is received on the server.
2) Actually this is a multi-domain AD forest, so the staging DC must be able to communicate at least with 1 DC in the Root domain. We deploy servers only in the child domain, however for Exchange and Lync, I realised that it is not enough to have 1 child DC
but we need permanent connectivity to at least 1 root DC as well
3) any other issue I havent even realised sofar.
The simple question: does such a guide exist at least for AD and Exchange?