My company presently occupies 2 buildings in the same city with a third smaller building on the same lot as the main office. The main office houses 51 XP workstations networked through Cisco switches on static IP addresses. We have 2 databases that interlink for maintaining customer data and records. The smaller building is fed through coax from the main building to provide network access for 5 additional XP workstations. The second location is several blocks away and communicates with the database via a VPN with an additional 4 XP workstations.

In the near future a small number of the employees from the main building will be moving to a 3rd building that is under construction. At that time the database servers will also be moved to the new building and the present main building will become a remote site connected via VPN similar to the 2nd site. It is presently unknown how many workstations will be needed at the new building however it is estimated at about 30-35. At this time all workstations are on a workgroup setup by a previous IT team, I am interested in changing the network to a domain environment with a File Server and Active Directory to simplify the desktop administration and user adiministration side of things. As you can imagine installing one application 95 times one at a time does not interest me, so having the ability to push out installation packages would be a dream.

As it stands no employee accesses the network from outside the workplace, however I do believe the CEo's may become interested in this ability in the near future as well. Email is contracted out along with web hosting.

I have looked into Windows Server 2008 and VMWare for implementing the network upgrades but since I am not up to date on my network courses, (last course was 2001 - Novell) I am open to suggestions and any information that can be provided by those that may see this situation more often then I do.

Thank you in advance.