In this chapter, we examined the aspects of hardware planning, platform deployment options, Windows Server 2003 installation planning, and an introduction to Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server 3.0 farm design and planning. Quite a wide swath to cut in a single chapter, but our approach was more at a high-level overview of the concepts, a manageable piece of information to start us down the right path to planning.

We began with a look into hardware planning with a detailed discussion of horizontal vs. vertical scaling. We looked at the traditional bottlenecks that terminal servers face to allow us to better understand when and how to scale up or out. We followed with a planning section on building redundancies into our server hardware.

Next, we spent a great deal of time reviewing the architect-level concepts of platform deployment. We covered the how am I going to deploy this hardware and software question by examining the five different methods or approaches to platform deployment: manual installation, unattended or scripted installations, server cloning, server provisioning, and finally the hybrid approach. For each solution, we examined the pros and cons and looked at examples of the type and size of environment in which the given approach may work best.

Once we were able to answer the how question, we turned our attention to Windows Server 2003 specifications for deployment. We looked at the minimum requirements and reviewed some realistic recommendations for the hardware. We also discussed the various software requirements, such as which version...