Planning an ISA Server Deployment (Part 2)

Welcome back to the 2000Trainers.com continuing series on ISA Server 2004! In this article, part two of “Planning an ISA Server 2004 Deployment”, we are going to cover server requirements necessary to actually install ISA 2004. We’ll talk about hardware requirements as well as some of the unique requirements we need to plan on when installing the software on both Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 platforms.

As we talked about in our last article, planning is of vital importance in an ISA Server 2004 deployment, in order to prevent having to go back and correct what may become serious problems later down the road after the install is declared a “success”. Before the CD is even inserted into the box which will become an ISA server, some considerations that must be taken into account are hardware and operating system platforms. We’ll talk about both of those issues in this article.

First, let’s look at hardware. ISA Server 2004 has a minimum set of hardware requirements, of course, as all Microsoft products do, but the minimum requirements are only established to set the low-end boundary of what a computer must have just to get ISA server installed, not necessarily to run it well. We’ll list the minimum requirements, but understand that you should always, especially in a large production environment, go with considerably more hardware than just the minimum if you want it to run right.

Microsoft says that the minimum hardware requirements for an ISA Server 2004 are: a Pentium III or compatible CPU running at least at 550 MHz, 256 MB of RAM, and an NTFS –formatted hard disk drive with at least 150MB of space available on it. Of course, if you are going to use the ISA server for content caching, you will need additional hard disk space. It should go without saying, of course, that a CD-ROM, keyboard, mouse, and VGA-compatible video adapter are also necessary to install the server.