Lab Maintenance/Network Sanity Check

Okay guys.. Some quick background. I work for a gov dept in Canada and we have a QA Lab which mimmics what we have in production.

We just migrated from NT back end to w2k3. ALso from NT workstation to XP workstations.

What I want to do is do a baseline sanity check on the lab to make sure its up and running the way it should be. I'll tell you what i have planned for now and i would like to hear some suggestions from you guys to maybe improve on what I have.

Workstations are pretty much looked after. We have a 300 page intergration Test Suite to make sure they are up to snuff and everything is running smooth.

The servers is where I'm somewhat lost.

I have to test several different componets.

SMS 2.0, exchange2003 and AD.

So far I'm using Secedit to do a baseline security analysis to insure that the proper RSOP is on all the servers. I'm also planning to go around to each server and look at the event logs. I can run replmon and dcdiag as well.

what else can I do? As far as exchange and SMS, is there not tools in the reskit I could use?

Thanks in advance,
Grey

For your baseline audit I would highly recommend you use GFI Lanscan from www.gfi.com . Its an incredible product and will allow you to do far more than just security scan. It has a very powerful patch deployment mechanism as well that will ease your life tremendously.

What other sort of auditting are you looking to do ? Is this basically security testing or just 'make sure its good to go' testing. If the later, the best way is to actually test drive the implementation for a few days in exactly the same manner as it will be when it goes live. Try and see how systems handle exceptional conditions as well.