The summer of 2012 consisted of rapid change initiatives from senior leadership which resulted in multiple, simultaneous large projects including, a migration from Novell Netware to Microsoft Active Directory, a full data center hardware refresh, a networking topography reconfiguration, and a corporate office relocation including designing a new server room. I was the lead engineer overseeing and executing multiple components on these projects. I was directly responsible, along with another colleague, for translating and implementing the business needs into technical configurations. This included the new network typography design for both the LAN and the WAN, the Active Directory OU structure, working with outside Consultants to spec out and purchase a new Cisco UCS blade environment and EMC storage array, and ensure business continuity continued through the transition. Our Active Directory initiative focused on creating a structure that was flexible with matching groups of users, to groups of resources, with the ability to set default connections and accommodate future exceptions. The aged Novell environment had several limitations that did not match business operations. This new foundation was giving us the opportunity to leverage our infrastructure in multiple ways including combining with distribution groups, Group Policy objects and many other network resources for a more efficient deployment. Our goal was for end users to be able to login to multiple machines and successfully utilize 90% of the functions that they required to be automatically configured and made available.  Apart from the 10% special software and special user situations, this environment has provided 6+ years and counting of very efficient and modular services. An important component that helped provide this was a custom partial roaming profile redirection. Standard roaming profiles can be very challenging with remote offices and slow WAN connections and tends to copy user workstation issues between computers. The three primary folders of importance were the user’s documents, favorites, and desktop. We use a power shell script and GPO’s to build and redirect just these three folders without the WAN delays of pulling full roaming profiles.

This project scope included the below links. 
•    VLANS and Network Topography
•    Load Balancer
•    VPN Configuration