The Zen of Hosting: Part 12 - Server Naming

Published on 11 July 2008 • Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

For a consistent environment, you need naming standards, but the idea of a standard is universal adherence—and in IT, there is no such thing. The first thing I looked at was a naming standard for the servers themselves. Thankfully, Microsoft has published recommendations on this (available here), which we decided to follow since it is simple and easy to use and remember.

Microsoft’s published recommended naming convention is aa-bbb-ccccc-dd. The definition of the format is:

• aa is the country code,
• bbb is the city designation,
• ccccc is the server role,
• dd is the server number.

If the server is part of a cluster, array, or similar, the last two characters of the server role indicate which cluster it belongs to.

Samples:

The first domain controller in Redmond, USA, would be: us-rmd-ad-01

• us = USA
• rmd = Redmond
• ad = Active Directory
• 01 = First Server

The first BizTalk server in the second BizTalk cluster in Cape Town, South Africa, would be: za-cpt-bts02-01

• za = South Africa
• cpt = Cape Town
• bts02 = BizTalk Cluster 2
• 01 = First Server

The first MSCRM server in Auckland, New Zealand, would be: nz-ack-crm-01

• nz = New Zealand
• ack = Auckland
• crm = MSCRM (corrected from infr)
• 01 = First Server

However, this is the only published naming standard I could find, so the naming for databases, ISA rules, etc. have all been developed internally—I can’t disclose those.

This also brings to an end this series on HMC hosting. But fear not—I have a quick 3-part mini-series on the top 3 tips for managing a HMC environment to keep busy with.