MCITP: Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Messaging Design and Deployment: Study Guide

Chapter 17. Planning for Exchange Server 2007 Messaging Infrastructure Improvements and Maintenance

Change management is an all-encompassing term that can mean many things to many people. For the purposes of this chapter, we will consider change management to include planning for infrastructure and configuration changes, as well as the process of analyzing your business requirements and creating your change-management plan based on this analysis. In addition, we will discuss patch management and monitoring/reporting as they relate to the Exchange Server 2007 planning process.

The main subjects of this chapter are as follows:

• Planning for infrastructure or configuration changes

• Documenting your Exchange Server 2007 organization

• Analyzing business requirements

• Defining the issue to be addressed

• Defining the change to be made

• Preparing your change deployment

• Planning change management

• Planning patch management

• Planning monitoring and reporting

Planning for Infrastructure or Configuration Changes

Planning for change in your environment will ensure the ongoing stability and availability of messaging services and allow you to introduce changes with minimal disruption and risk. We will discuss how to go about planning for change in the following sections.

Infrastructure changes include changes to improve performance, availability, and resiliency. Examples of this are adding servers, increasing storage, ...