Maintenance checklist for Windows Server 2003

Daily Operations Checklist

Checklist: Performing Physical Environmental Checks

Use this checklist to ensure that physical environment checks are completed.

Task:

·         Verify that environmental conditions are tracked and maintained.

·         Check temperature and humidity to ensure that environmental systems such as heating and air conditioning settings are within acceptable conditions, and that they function within the hardware manufacturer's specifications.

·         Verify that physical security measures such as locks, dongles, and access codes have not been breached and that they function correctly.

·         Ensure that your physical network and related hardware such as routers, switches, hubs, physical cables, and connectors are operational.

Checklist: Check Backups

Task:

·         Make sure that the recommended minimum backup strategy of a daily online backup is completed.

·         Verify that the previous backup operation completed.

·         Analyze and respond to errors and warnings during the backup operation.

·         Follow the established procedure for tape rotation, labeling, and storage.

·         Verify that the transaction logs were successfully purged (if your backup type is purging logs).

·         Make sure that backups complete under service level agreements (SLA).

·          Checklist: Check CPU and Memory Use

·         Use this checklist to record the sampling time of each counter.

Checklist: Check Disk Use

Follow the checklist and record the drive letter, designation, and available disk space.

Task

·         Create a list of all drives and label them in three categories: drives with transaction logs, drives with queues, and other drives.

·         Check disks with transaction log files.

·         Check disks with SMTP queues.

·         Check other disks.

·         Use server monitors to check free disk space.

·         Check performance on disks.

Checklist: Event Logs

Check event logs using the following checklist.

Task

·         Check application and system logs on the server to see all errors.

·         Check application and system logs on the Exchange server to see all warnings.

·         Note repetitive warning and error logs.

·         Respond to discovered failures and problems.

Weekly Maintenance Checklist

Checklist: Create Reports

Use this checklist to create status reports to help with capacity planning, service level agreement (SLA) reviews, and performance analysis.

Task: 

·         Use daily data from event log and System Monitor to create reports.

·         Report on disk usage.

·         Create reports on memory and CPU usage.

·         Generate uptime and availability reports.

Checklist: Incident Reports

Use this checklist to create incident reports.

Task 

·         List the top generated, resolved, and pending incidents.

·         Create solutions for unresolved incidents.

·         Update reports to include new trouble tickets.

·         Create a document depository for troubleshooting guides and post- mortems about outages.

Checklist: Antivirus Defense

Use this checklist to perform your antivirus defense.

Task 

·         Perform a virus scan on each computer.

·         Check anti-virus definition updates timely.

Checklist: Status Meeting

Use this checklist to conduct weekly status meetings during which the tasks are reviewed.

Task 

·         Server and network status for the overall organization and segments.

·         Organizational performance and availability.

·         Overview reports and incidents.

·         Risk analysis and evaluation including upcoming changes.

·         Capacity, availability, and performance reviews.

·         Service level agreement (SLA) performance, and review items that have not met target objectives.

Hope it helps.