How to put things in order in the Windows economy, from which edge to approach?

Question

Active Directory

Good evening! Lord administrators, I faced the task - to put things in order in a terrible mess. I got a server room with an economy: a server with virtual machines AD, IIS, MSSQL, 1C and much more. Fleet of cars, about 20 pieces. I don’t have experience of working on such a scale yet, I’ll say more with AD I’ve only dealt a couple of times .. I don’t even know which edge to approach, I feel that I first need to deal with AD, set up backup so that nothing is lost, then slowly move on to the rest .
Can you recommend useful literature to quickly join the topic? What is the best way to start acquaintance and putting things in order?
I will be very grateful to each answer!

Answer 1

Who was the previous admin?
Start with his notes, and if he is available, call him in for questioning. Cases are transferred in a good way with documentation of both the architecture and the main production processes.
Conduct a complete inventory of hardware and software. Find out what the licenses are, where they are, double-check.
See how everything works now, after which they will already be introduced into the process without breaking the old one.

Answer 2

You can start by reading this book:
Among the authors are Limoncelli T., etc.
This book will help in general to understand what and why to do.
Further youtube and google will help you!
And keep asking questions on the forums, but specific ones.
PS! The fact that they decided to start with a backup is very reasonable.

Answer 3

How to clean up the Windows economy

And where did you get the idea that there is no order if "I dealt with AD only a couple of times" ???
I join Sergey - find the previous admin and accept normal business.

Answer 4

Backup everything. Different systems (programs) on different media. Then backup backups. Believe that everything is read and restored. And then to put things in order.

Answer 5

Yesterday I spent half the night reading books :) some understanding of the processes came.
Advise more sensible literature, please :)