Migrating from CC4 to Vanilla - advice required

[tj2419]

Hi

 

I am starting to plan for a possible migration from a RM CC4 network to a windows vanilla network. Basically I want to plan and do some research into what will be needed and how feasible it is so I can put forward a proposal to our SLT.

 

First question is for anyone who has done this. Do you have any documentation you created along the way, plans or checklists of points you needed to consider or tools you needed to replace.

 

Are you happier after the switch? How many guys did you have on the switch? Did you do it yourself or third party company?

 

What did you replace the rm tools with? Like RMMC, how do you image machines?

 

Would you tie this in with an upgrade to virtualising the network? Or do vanilla one year and virtualise after?

 

We are basically replacing our three ageing curriculum servers and a nas box where we are running out of space.

 

Any advice or docs would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks

[featured_spectre]

1: set up a blank server and work station, look at ALL GPOs, look at what is in place on CC4, try to replicate on the server and test machine.

2: tweak the GPOs for various levels, make sure they are exactly as you want (and document it). If all goes belly up, you have the list and can re-do it reasonably quick

3: look at SCCM for software deployment of software and look at how it deploys and make sure you know it well

 

Good luck

[sparkeh]

Visualise from the start IMO. Given that with server 2012 you can safely snapshot a DC it will actually help should you make a big mistake and need to go back a step.

 

As above look into SCCM, pita to set up but awesome when running and if you have/plan to have EES agreement it's reasonable price.

[FishCustard]

We found SCCM too bloated and cumbersome for our needs and went with MDT for imaging, GPO and PS scripts for software deployment. Impero is great for classroom managment (and remote support too!)

 

If you're based around London you're welcome to come and have a look at our network, we binned CC3 over the summer and couldn't be happier at the result. CC3/4 will hold you back.

[synaesthesia]

We spent about a year testing (we planned well in advance) various solutions and ideas and ended up smitten with SCCM. It can be overkill for smaller establishments but for us on a split site it's awesome as there's a lot we can do with it in that respect that can't be done properly/easily with MDT (I say the latter as with planning pretty much ANYTHING can be done )

After we were happy that SCCM was going to do what was required, we got heads together and made sure the data could easily be transferred and kept staff involved at all stages. Transferring user data and accounts is particularly easy using the built in tools with Windows Server, and things like RMPublic, RMShared Documents and RMStaff was a good opportunity to give staff plenty of notice of change. "We are going to be getting rid of any software we see isn't used, we're going to re-organise and rename the shared student and shared staff areas. Anything you want to suggest, add or ask, ask now"

We had already implemented Impero at the end of our CC3 lifecycle so had already gotten experience of it's capabilities and it was crucial to the decision to move as it made so many things so much easier. It's best not to look for "direct replacements for RMMC" because there isn't one. Everyone knows how to use the AD tool anyway, there's plenty of powershell modifications if you want something less bulky. Lots of bulk management tools available for users come start of term (Wisesoft is your friend here!)

 

Some of the planning we did from the start:

Hardware audit: is all our hardware up to it, client and server (We built 2 new ESXi servers for this)

Applications/packages to keep or ditch (also a great time for a licensing and software audit)

Backup changes (old backup solutions not much good for Server 2008R2 let alone 2012)

Permissions audit (as we were starting from scratch with shared areas we needed to be sure who had access to what and again a good point to remove old dross)

GPO and Security Groups audit. We didn't really want to mirror the RM GPO's as they're horrible bulky and unnecessarily complicated. We did CC3 to Vanilla and there really is some voodoo going on with CC4's GPOs. Take care. A lot of security groups were fully redundant and it was a great opportunity to simplify.

Document all the way through.

We also gave staff the opportunity to test the new system on a single laptop too; this proved invaluable for our heavier users like our data admin staff. Get to know windows 7 (as we moved from XP) as well as Office 2010.

Planned for informal training for all staff.

 

We're very glad we did it. We actually had a busier start to this year when nothing changed, than we did at the start of last year when we moved and changed every single system we had!

[samba_man]

It's quite a task but as long as you plan and test as much as you sensibly can it will be fine. I filled an A4 exercise book with notes, ramblings and questions to answer! I spread the work over a year, a day a week then the final push was over the Summer Holidays. Work out how long you'll need to do the task and then double it. I did it single handed apart from a week in the Summer where I had a volunteer give me a hand. It's not something I would want to do again by myself!

[tj2419]

Just wondering what other people have done when moving from CC4 to Windows Vanilla. For the users. When recreating the users what was your process? Did you create the users on vanilla and then copy the files across? Give them new profiles?

 

Cheers

[synaesthesia]

New profiles (obviously, as we got rid of roaming and went for mandatory to huge benefit, especially coming from a CC3/4 background) and the files were copied across, retaining the same format & folder structure. We differed the shares a little, RM's method of mapping home drives is far from ideal/good practice so it made sense to change that.

[samba_man]

We didn't bother with roaming or mandatory profiles, though I did create a default domain user profile. I exported a list of users then used Mikeys Magic Active User Manager to recreate the users. Copied the user folder file structure over and used icacls running in a for loop to apply the correct permissions to the folders. That last bit wasn't as easy as it sounds, took a bit of working out mind as I hadn't used icacls before!

 

The whole RM to Vanilla process was a bit scary at times as it was such a steep learning curve, although I had contingencies in place as much as I could, there were a few moments where I could have quite easily chucked it all in and gone home to bed.

Edited March 6, 2014 by samba_man

[tj2419]

Hi Just looking at adding sccm to our res for a year to test it out. It looks like there are a few different components / flavours.

 

What versions do you guys use?

 

 

We aren't going to have virtual desktops yet but would like to use it to manage images, application deployment and endpoint i think for our antivirus. Anything else i should be looking at for it?

 

Thanks

[synaesthesia]

Standard is more than sufficient - that will scale from 10 to 100,000 machines and will still be far, far more than you will ever need. It really is overkill; something myself and @tekins were talking about earlier this week - it's fantastic but it's built around larger deployments. We really do expect to see the likes of Impero to continue exponential growth offering something akin to RM's CC4 but clearly a lot better and designed as a layer on top of a vanilla network rather than continuing down the path they have (which is clearly holding them back).

[tj2419]

Cheers @synaesthesia

 

Does anyone have a good company to contact for a budgetary quote? Obviously it's not going to be till Summer 2015 that i would be carrying out any work but would be useful to see if getting Hyper-V or VM Ware would be within our budget. Or whether we carry on and use Xenserver (Free edition).

 

Need to get the servers about 71 desktops and some SSD's and possibly veeam licenses if we went virtual for the servers.

 

The question then starts if we went virtual how many servers we would get as we are currently 3 RM CC4 servers with the users split across the three servers.

[synaesthesia]

VMWare ESXi won't cost you anything to a certain point - you can certainly easily run a school without paying a penny to them, but as you say running veeam for backup is a must.

We had 3 CC3 servers originally over a split site and now run 2 hosts (one on each site) each running a DC and a file/app server. Users are split over the servers, staff & 6th form on one, all other students on the other. Shared Documents and other shared drives are on both servers using DFS and configured so each site gets data from the server closest to them.

Our hosts are not anything much to shout about - both self builds, xeon 5540s with plenty of memory, SATA storage and 2 x dual gigabit network connections allowing for performance and failover.

 

Serversource.co.uk have been very good to us for servers but no doubt plenty of the guys on here will be happy to throw you some decent quotes - shout up @VeryPC @Millgate @ict-direct etc

[tj2419]

Hi

 

Anyone with experience does this look like the correct licensing for SCCM to be added to our EES?

 

1 T9L-00069 - SysCtrStd ALNG LicSAPk OLV F 1Y Acdmc AP 2Proc

1 J6A-00481 - SysCtrCnfgMgrSvrMLStd ALNG LicSAPk OLV F 1Y Acdmc AP

 

And am i right in thinking this should be set up as a separate VM?

 

Thanks

[tmcd35]

What are you looking to do with SCCM? The basic licencing requirements are built in to the standard EES agreement as part of the desktop CAL's package. You only need these additional licences if you want to manage a server with SCCM.

[sparkeh]

What are you looking to do with SCCM? The basic licencing requirements are built in to the standard EES agreement as part of the desktop CAL's package. You only need these additional licences if you want to manage a server with SCCM.

What about if you don't have the Desktop CAL pack and want it separately, like us?

 

Hi

 

Anyone with experience does this look like the correct licensing for SCCM to be added to our EES?

 

1 T9L-00069 - SysCtrStd ALNG LicSAPk OLV F 1Y Acdmc AP 2Proc

1 J6A-00481 - SysCtrCnfgMgrSvrMLStd ALNG LicSAPk OLV F 1Y Acdmc AP

 

And am i right in thinking this should be set up as a separate VM?

 

Thanks

Now our licensing is different, we do have "J6A-00481 - SysCtrCnfgMgrSvrMLStd ALNG LicSAPk OLV F 1Y Acdmc AP" but in place of the top one we have "J5A-01181 SysCtrCnfgMgrSvrMLStd ALNG LicSAPk OLV F 1Y Acdmc Ent PerUser"

 

We have enough licences for the second one to cover the amount of FTE staff.

[tmcd35]

What about if you don't have the Desktop CAL pack and want it separately, like us?

 

Honestly didn't realise you could buy EES without! I thought the basic package was Windows+Office+CALs for eash desktop.

[tj2419]

What are you looking to do with SCCM? The basic licencing requirements are built in to the standard EES agreement as part of the desktop CAL's package. You only need these additional licences if you want to manage a server with SCCM.

 

Hi

 

I am wanting to manage desktop clients so deploy images to them and software mainly and see what else it can do along those lines. Mainly manage computers.

 

Would the version thats built into the EES be enough? When you say desktop cals all we have on our EES is the client OS one which lets us license windows 7 and one for MS Office.

 

Cheers

[synaesthesia]

Keep it on it's own server (virtual is fine) - it's quite heavy, especially due to the SQL side of it. Can't help with the licensing side I'm afraid, it gave us a headache trying to work it out last time but our licensing provider managed to sort it out for us (Phoenix)

[tmcd35]

Hi

 

Would the version thats built into the EES be enough? When you say desktop cals all we have on our EES is the client OS one which lets us license windows 7 and one for MS Office.

 

Cheers

 

Here's the EES documentation: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=microsoft+ees&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdownload.microsoft.com%2Fdownload%2FF%2F6%2F6%2FF6611596-992F-498A-A8EE-B0B39A6A4D0A%2FEnrollment_for_Education_Solutions_Program_Guide.pdf&ei=_msqVKjLOYbWav3bgLAO&usg=AFQjCNEcCYBStZ9JBMRm8J287FWI9lDxcQ&sig2=3LNdBiLRYuq2NSrp0SzFRQ

 

If you purchase: EES Enterprise Desktop with Core CAL suite then you get everything you need. The CoreCAL suite includes desktop licences for SCCM. SCCM is licensed by managed clients so in effect the CoreCAL includes the rights to run a SQL sever and SCCM server.

 

AFAIK that's the cheapest way.

[sparkeh]

Honestly didn't realise you could buy EES without! I thought the basic package was Windows+Office+CALs for eash desktop.

Yep we used to just licence office under EES, this year we added on SCCM, its peanuts!

[pirran]

In the past 6 months we've retired a CC4 domain(circa 1000 computers), including local Exchange servers and around 12 other servers including some Hyper-V setups. We've brought online a dell vrtx box running vmware, sccm etc. and then office 365 to handle emails and some storage. The 120 staff laptops here have always been standalone, redeploying and moving all these to a domain has certainly been a learning experience for the users "why can't I install my kids games on it? ...' They are now virus, trojan and toolbar free, and an added benefit is that they aren't in the office every 5 minutes with problems.

 

Horrible experience with onedrive for business but apart from that it's all getting there now. One of the time consuming issues has been trying to find out what software people actually want, then packaging it.

 

Perhaps I should add, I've only been in my current workplace for a year. If you'd like any further information regarding transition from CC4 when do PM me.

[tj2419]

Here's the EES documentation: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=microsoft+ees&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdownload.microsoft.com%2Fdownload%2FF%2F6%2F6%2FF6611596-992F-498A-A8EE-B0B39A6A4D0A%2FEnrollment_for_Education_Solutions_Program_Guide.pdf&ei=_msqVKjLOYbWav3bgLAO&usg=AFQjCNEcCYBStZ9JBMRm8J287FWI9lDxcQ&sig2=3LNdBiLRYuq2NSrp0SzFRQ

 

If you purchase: EES Enterprise Desktop with Core CAL suite then you get everything you need. The CoreCAL suite includes desktop licences for SCCM. SCCM is licensed by managed clients so in effect the CoreCAL includes the rights to run a SQL sever and SCCM server.

 

AFAIK that's the cheapest way.

 

Trying to get my head around the licensing again.

 

If i got this Education Desktop with Core CAL Suite

 

I wouldn't need to get anything additional to run SCCM and it would include Antivirus, MS Office and MS Windows OS for all my desktops.

 

Would i still license it by FTE staff so 140 x price of Education Desktop with Core CAL Suite?

 

Does anyone have a very rough idea how much each Education Desktop with Core CAL Suite is so i can compare it to our current costs?

 

What would be the easiest method to get SCCM now for a trial version to start testing and setting it up on a trial VM? Would it be to change my EES or is there a trial version?

 

Cheers

Edited October 6, 2014 by tj2419
More info

[tj2419]

Found answers for the other questions but still wondering on these:

 

Does anyone know what would be the easiest method to get SCCM now for a trial version to start testing and setting it up on a trial VM? Would it be to change my EES or is there a trial version?

 

If i got this Education Desktop with Core CAL Suite would i need anything else to run sccm?

 

Cheers