How to find reliable companies for CC4 to Vanilla migration

[tj2419]

Hi

 

I am planning for a big network upgrade over Summer 2015. We will be replacing 3 RM CC4.2 servers with upgraded equipment.

 

I am currently researching three different options available to us.

1. Stay with RM and work with them to upgrade us to CC4.5 on a virtualised network. Had the quote and it is quite expensive.
   
2. Bring in a third party company to migrate us to a Virtualised Vanilla network from our current CC4.2
   
3. Upgrade ourselves to Windows Vanilla Virtualised network. Myself (NM), Assistant Network Manager and an apprentice.
   

 

Now we are currently setting up a test environment to practice the upgrade ourselves to research that route.

 

Can anyone recommend any reliable companies who could migrate our network from CC4 to Vanilla. Including setting up the virtualised environment and migrating all current data and users, setting up standard GPO's etc. We would also be purchasing all the hardware from them along with desktops that need replacing.

[mikeyw]

DMS might be worth a try, we use them and cant fault them. we are running visualized they know what they are doing and really well priced.

 

/www.dmsystem.co.uk/

[snagrat]

Where are you based?

[tj2419]

Where are you based?

 

Sorry that would have been helpful if i had included it.

 

I am based in Wirral, North West, near Liverpool

[Tallwood_6]

Curiously from speaking to an RM engineer they seem to do quite a few themselves including SCCM deployments!

[tj2419]

Really! That is surprising. Did they give you any ball park figures?

[Tallwood_6]

No pricing as he's just an engineer but one word of warning he gave us was that in a number of cases where he installed SCCM to replace CC4 a lot of customers weren't necessarily prepared for the extra steps required for user management outside the management console .i.e SCCM is best teamed with something like impero.

I'm thinking about getting some pricing from RM for this though as it sounds like they have engineers equipped for most types of installs now outside of the usual RM product range!

[zoohead]

If you do a search on here for migrating from RM to Vanilla, you will find a lot of information. I did it back in 2011 and managed to do the whole job mostly on my own, with advice from other Network Managers, both on here and visiting other schools. SCCM was the biggest pain but there are great online guides and once its up and running is very reliable. I decided on Salamander for user management, but there are various tools. Hyper-v is a doddle. I took the easy route of keeping the RM AD structure and just adding our own managed section to it with new group policies and security groups etc. I had no formal IT training and had to learn AD etc from the ground up. If it is not until next summer you have plenty of time to plan and test. you wont regret it.

[Leeoakley]

There are a few good companies out there you just need to ask about.

 

Even if you decide to go alone, I'd still get a quote for both support during the migration and the full migration itself.

 

Just a bit of a safety net, if things go wrong.

[the_quick]

We did our migration from CC3 to vanilla with help from third party engineer. He did not know RM staff - and telling the truth most of them do not need to know.

Just work with them, tell them what you want to achieve - good MS engineer will do just that. RM system is bloated, heavy on resources, we simplified it. Copy all users account using CSV and than just copied all home folders. Setting up folder redirection was a bit complicated process and took a day or two to test it fully. Took us a week for creating new domain users account and exchange. Than took some time to move all data. But most of the time we spent on deployment desktops.

We are using 2008 R2, with WSUS, WDS and KMS server. Before we had 3 physical servers that were quite decent and we changed them to vmware hosts. We have separated lost of tasks from RM DCs - they were before DC with dhcp and dns, file servers , print servers and other functions. With virtual environment I prefer to create more small servers with separate roles.

 

It is a summer job, lost of work but well worth it - I would never go back to RM system. First year we spent on light tuning and small changes - but from day one it worked better than RM.

 

So in short, find a good MS engineer who knows how to setup domains. No need to know anything about RM.

[spc-rocket]

Hi,

 

Ergo computing based in Nottingham are really good and helped us with our migration from CC3 to vanilla and visualization project.

 

Ash.