Questions[topology](server)

Specifics:

• 4 floors. Floors consist of central cubicle area and exterior offices pre-wired to wiring closet on each floor.
• IT data center will be located on 1st floor
• Conduit exists in building between floors
• Data and voice networks needed (either VLAN or physically separated)
• User count per floor upwards of 100 locations with 4 data runs to each location
• Wiring closets will consist of stackable gigabit switches

What is the best design for connecting the floors to the IT central data center. Do you make a hub/spoke design with each floor run directly to the data center? Make a ring from 1st to 2nd to 3rd to 4th and then back to 1st? Copper or fiber? 10G or port-channel 1G connections? Is it better to separate each floor into its own subnet with routing, use VLANs?

What would be best topology considering that:

1. 6 x Exchange 2010 Standard Licenses
2. 2 x Separate locations that are supposed to support redundancy in case of link problems
3. 4 x Forefront TMG 2010 with Forefront Security and Forefront Protection/Security

Multiple locations worldwide using those Exchange. Most locations will be connected with VPN Tunnel (the ones hosting Exchange for sure).

I was thinking something like this:

Location MAIN (about 70-100 people):

1. 2x TMG 2010 in NLB
2. 1x Exchange 2010 CAS/HUB Role
3. 2x Exchange 2010 Mailbox Role (Active + Passive)

Location SUPPORT (about 20 people):

1. 2x TMG 2010 in NLB
2. 1x Exchange 2010 CAS/HUB Role
3. 2x Exchange 2010 Mailbox Role (Active + Passive)

Management wants to make sure that in case of problems in main location (power failure, link loss etc) second location can support all traffic from around the world and vice-versa. We have 6-7 locations and more comming up (not big ones but like 10+ people per each location).

I do know that CAS/HUB is single point of failure (and no NLB), but i simply lack more licenses to do some redundancy on that.

What do you think about this approach? What would be better approach according to you?

This very well may not be the correct forum to post this sort of thing on but its a question that's baffled me for years.

I'm very well aware of how servers themselves work and am fairly well versed in most things computer.

Take serverfault.com for example.

I type http://www.serverfault.com/ into my browsers address bar. At that point my computer performs a reverse dns lookup to get the IP address.

I know that the dns information is located on a DNS server, but how does my computer know where to immediately look for that? Are there DNS servers at fixed IP addresses that my computer automatically goes looking for?

Second, once my computer has the IP address of serverfault.com, it goes to (in my case) comcast to start making its way to serverfaults servers. How does that process work? When running a trace route to serverfault.com, it makes about 16 hops until it finds exactly what I'm looking for.

Obviously it cant make a direct connection to serverfault.com because that would take a direct physical route to the server but what controls the request through the network? What makes it take the route that I see in the trace route?

I know this question is insanely open but if I could at least get some links to outside sources or know what to search google for that would be immensely helpful.

I want to see what nodes exist under a certain domain from within the domain. Short of querying every valid IP address within that domain, is there a way to get all records/map the network?

I'm looking for a tool or IconSet do create a picture of a network topology. The network doesn't exist, so I don't need a tool that scans a network and creates a picture of that network.

It would be nice if things like server(database, web, file), switches and firewall were included.

A free tool or iconset would be great because I probably only need it one time, but if there aren't any good free options I will pay if it is not a couple hundred dollar or euros.