Hello,
So I am the only IT person in our company. It's a mid sized business , we have about 90 employees. We have office 365 for office suites. We don't have Active directory or exchange server or any servers for that matter, we have two file servers in house but that's about it. We have a vendor (myhosting) for our email so they have a server for us on the cloud and they charge us by user. Most of our servers are hosted by Rackspace.
Now I have a pretty good idea about configuring servers including server 2012 but most of my career I have always been a helpdesk technician, tier 3, in all of the big companies I worked for in the past. However, this company doesn't have any ideas on how IT department is suppose to run, how it would involve a system engineer at the minimum so I they come to me for everything...advanced staff...so now they want me to come up with a plan to have IT in house, bringing all servers from racks-pace, implementing exchange server, AD ...( they have no idea what i'm talking about IT infrastructure, AD or Exchange server... they just want to cut costs... and they want everything to be done by me. This includes, planing, budgeting, implementing, deploying and IT Infrastructure by me...they point their figure at me for everything. I mentioned to them we might need an engineer but they pointed their figure at me...no wonder why they paid me a litter more extra than what other companies would pay for a helpdesk technician and i'm used to the money so I don't want to go back. Also, I do want advance my career somewhere so I want to do it all...this is stepping stone for me to be a system engineer.
So my question is:
1. What is the best Microsoft certification exam or a book I need to prepare my self.
2. Is it ideal to implement Active Directory for 80-100 employees, also is there a number of employee required for AD?
3. What is the best resource or guide I can get to help me design an IT Infrastructure for Midsized business?
4. What kind of networking do I need? Is it better to manage Networking, Firewall in-house when having IT Infrastructure in-house?
5. What are the minimum Hardware and Software I need to begin with?...we have about 20 instances on Rackspace...our SharePoint and web server is hosted by myhosting.com
4. What is the maximum for visualization...how many servers? Also, what servers are better off to put them in Hyper-v or any visualization...SQL, file servers?
5. Would AD and Exchange server be configure in one server and are called domain servers?
6. Is there a best tool or software to design an IT infrastructure ...that's already designed for that? Other than Visio?
7. What are the main networking infrastructure concepts I need to know for implementing IT Infrastructure in-house. DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP? What is the best resource/book/guide/too/ I can get to get a good understanding of how to implement those?
8. Are DNS and DHCP servers configure in a separate server, I know what they are but I never configured one...so how does it work...does it work in a server that has AD or it has to be on a different server?
9. Is it easier to get Microsoft partnership for midsize business or go through dealers?
10. What is the easiest way to get Microsoft certification? I have a good experience with Microsoft windows and products but never had any certification. How long does it take to study the required exams and get certified?
11. How long does it take to build an IT Infrastructure for midsize business (we are government contractors, most of our servers like SQL servers and web servers are for our clients but we have developers for dealing with those...I just need to bring those servers in-house and configure them as a company equipment and maintain them... kind of like System Administrator.
I appreciate any help on this...I do!
Best regards.