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Understanding the ADMP Part 1: Welcome to Contoso

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Over the next few months, I will be focusing on how to setup the Active Directory Management Pack (ADMP), how it works, and how to use it to monitor your environment. In order to facilitate that discussion, I will be setting up my own private domain. Enter everyone favorite non-existent company: Contoso.

Contoso has an Active Directory forest with multiple domain, sites, and version of Windows. The layout of their forest looks like the diagram below. As we progress through the different scenarios, I will likely need to add more machine to the environment, so expect this diagram to change over time.

Contoso Topology

In reality, the entire Contoso infrastructure lives as virtual machines on a server in my garage, so the setup will be quite simplified. However, this set of machines should provide an environment with enough variability to show how the ADMP can be used.

The first step deploying the ADMP is to setup System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) on a dedicated machine; this will be the first project we tackle, and the topic of the next post.