(Another) CC4 to Vanilla thread

[HTCPCP]

For training, always worth looking on https://mva.microsoft.com/ Loads of good training options there to watch.

 

As for testing. A good option is to buy a refurbed workstation (can then go out/be used by you later), and use the free trial version of server 2016 and one of your machines to play around a bit and learn how to do it. You can, if you really wanted to even install the server 2016 trial on a normal desktop too, which is an even cheaper option to play around with. All you need then is just a spare switch

[tomo1095]

Get yourselves on a few MCSA courses for server 2016.

 

It's easier than you think to bulk manage users... You've already got all the tools on the servers like Active Directory and Group Policy - Have a look around them, just don't make any changes if you're unsure.

 

A vanilla networks not much different, infact most find it far easier and less time consuming. Plus any issues you come up against will have solutions easily found on the web, rather than relying on RM support.

[foofighterjim]

For training, always worth looking on https://mva.microsoft.com/ Loads of good training options there to watch.

 

As for testing. A good option is to buy a refurbed workstation (can then go out/be used by you later), and use the free trial version of server 2016 and one of your machines to play around a bit and learn how to do it. You can, if you really wanted to even install the server 2016 trial on a normal desktop too, which is an even cheaper option to play around with. All you need then is just a spare switch

 

Thanks for the training recommendation, I will have a look at that over the weekend.

 

As for the testing (this will sound utterly pathetic), the best we have going spare are computers with 10 year old AMD Athlon 2000+ processor with 2GB RAM and a 120GB 5400rpm SATA II disk. Budget until May is £0.00

[cullingsh]

I ditched CC4 in favour or vanilla Windows network last summer - long slog with lots of late nights to get everything finished for the start of term but we made it.

 

We now have a more flexible system and don't pay a fortune to RM in support costs etc.

 

Can you not set up a test server VM on your current hardware?

[foofighterjim]

Can you not set up a test server VM on your current hardware?

 

Now why hadn't this occurred to me! I could attach the server and a host or two the staging network, they wouldn't have internet access but I could at least try and play with the GPOs without interfering with the rest of the network.

Edited January 15, 2018 by foofighterjim

[pijpug]

Funnily enough in the same position here. RM Support is a ridiculous expense. Their Hardware warranties are 5 years max. I've managed to get an additional 2 year warranty on my EMC SAN from Park Place. Sending them the specs on the RM Hosts next week to see how much they want for warranty on them to give us some breathing space.

 

I've found RM's sales team has started to become a bit pushy, and having spoken to an independent partner and running a few Analysis tools on the network, RM's quote for a refresh would in fact have been under spec'd for our requirements.

 

Any recommendations on suppliers for SANs & Hosts greatly appreciated.

[foofighterjim]

Funnily enough in the same position here. RM Support is a ridiculous expense. Their Hardware warranties are 5 years max. I've managed to get an additional 2 year warranty on my EMC SAN from Park Place. Sending them the specs on the RM Hosts next week to see how much they want for warranty on them to give us some breathing space.

 

Let me know if those extensions come in at a favourable price, if so it could be possible for us to keep the hardware and just change to Vanilla this year and then do the hardware the year after.

[AlanD]

Their Hardware warranties are 5 years max. I've managed to get an additional 2 year warranty on my EMC SAN

 

Ive never quite understood why hardware warranties are taken up by schools. If a system board fails in a 3 year old SAN ...or a motherboard in a server, then you are not going get them replaced under a warranty..because even a year is a long time in the manufacturing process and no guarantor of warranties are hoarding and stocking spares. The best the warranty usually offers is the price of the failed component offset against a new, and often overpriced new replacement of a new server or SAN. Better to up the warranty money over the years, and on average you always come out on tops even if you do have the risk of an unexpected replacement one year. ..... but there is good chance you would end up paying most of that cost even if it’s in warranty...as there is no new for old policy if replacement parts can’t be sourced. In fact you are better off finding a replacement part of ebay or something.

 

Yes, if they are offering 3 years warranty for free when new, it’s worth having, but when there is lots of kit in a school on average you are better off negotiating with management a contingency fund to cover unexpected failures.

[Primus]

Ive never quite understood why hardware warranties are taken up by schools. If a system board fails in a 3 year old SAN ...or a motherboard in a server, then you are not going get them replaced under a warranty..because even a year is a long time in the manufacturing process and no guarantor of warranties are hoarding and stocking spares. The best the warranty usually offers is the price of the failed component offset against a new, and often overpriced new replacement of a new server or SAN. Better to up the warranty money over the years, and on average you always come out on tops even if you do have the risk of an unexpected replacement one year. ..... but there is good chance you would end up paying most of that cost even if it’s in warranty...as there is no new for old policy if replacement parts can’t be sourced. In fact you are better off finding a replacement part of ebay or something.

 

Yes, if they are offering 3 years warranty for free when new, it’s worth having, but when there is lots of kit in a school on average you are better off negotiating with management a contingency fund to cover unexpected failures.

 

Alan this may well be your experience but it certainly isn't my experience with Dell critical care on my servers and SAN! Dell keeps adequate stock of replacement parts to do like for like in just the same way that HP does with their switches and lifetime warranty - I've had a switch or 2 fail but even many years after they were produced I get the exact same switch in replacement.

[snagrat]

Alan this may well be your experience but it certainly isn't my experience with Dell critical care on my servers and SAN! Dell keeps adequate stock of replacement parts to do like for like in just the same way that HP does with their switches and lifetime warranty - I've had a switch or 2 fail but even many years after they were produced I get the exact same switch in replacement.

 

Agreed! Not sure what AlanD is on about.

[NB9457]

I've had an 8 year old HPE SAN have several HDDs and a controller under warranty and an old tape drive have the mechanic replaced.

 

Big names keep spares and plenty of them, the service would be pretty useless otherwise.

[jmak]

If your current setup includes licensing based on OVS you're entitled to sign up for Microsoft Imagine which includes access to their online courses as well as licences for full versions of all server versions. The only constraint is that you're not allowed to use the servers in production. You could host the VM on one of your production servers (a domain controller only takes limited resources) or is quite realistic to run it in hyper V on a client (Hyper-V is included in Windows 8 onwards - again with OVS you could install that OS on any of your existing clients).

 

Edit details here: https://imagine.microsoft.com/en-us/Institutions/Enroll

 

It took a couple of days for my subscription to be authorised, but no issues.

Edited January 20, 2018 by jmak

[AlanD]

Well if I added up the money I spent on repairs and replacements it would not come to the amount I would have to spent on warranty cover....so unless you get a really good deal on a warranty I'd question its worth....and it certainly wouldn't make me stop using stuff if I couldn't extend its warranty - although I might start looking around and shopping for I might replace it with should there be a need to. Usually its just replacing a hard drive in a RAID, or maybe a power supply and network fibre adaptor - easily covered by keeping those items in stock for a lot less than a warranty.

[Blue_Cookeh]

Ive never quite understood why hardware warranties are taken up by schools. If a system board fails in a 3 year old SAN ...or a motherboard in a server, then you are not going get them replaced under a warranty..because even a year is a long time in the manufacturing process and no guarantor of warranties are hoarding and stocking spares. The best the warranty usually offers is the price of the failed component offset against a new, and often overpriced new replacement of a new server or SAN. Better to up the warranty money over the years, and on average you always come out on tops even if you do have the risk of an unexpected replacement one year. ..... but there is good chance you would end up paying most of that cost even if it’s in warranty...as there is no new for old policy if replacement parts can’t be sourced. In fact you are better off finding a replacement part of ebay or something.

 

Yes, if they are offering 3 years warranty for free when new, it’s worth having, but when there is lots of kit in a school on average you are better off negotiating with management a contingency fund to cover unexpected failures.

 

We get our Lenovo laptops with 4 year warranties now - they have never kicked up a fuss if I've requested a part, and an engineer is always out on site either next day or two days after I submit the support ticket. For the extra couple of hundred quid it's been worth it's weight in gold with our ThinkPads. Even if a kid pulls a load of keys off a teacher's laptop, Lenovo never ask any questions and send us the replacement part nbd.

 

Same for Dell ProSupport NBD on our servers, and the HP lifetime warranties on our switches. I'd say financially it's made sense for us (maybe not on the servers, they've been rock solid).

[fiza]

@foofighterjim - One of our Schools is looking to move away from CC4 to Vanilla so I am watching this thread with interest. I have no experience of CC4 but I guess there is no way to uninstall it? It must be so intertwined with your Domain that you have to start from scratch and build a new domain?

[NB9457]

@foofighterjim - One of our Schools is looking to move away from CC4 to Vanilla so I am watching this thread with interest. I have no experience of CC4 but I guess there is no way to uninstall it? It must be so intertwined with your Domain that you have to start from scratch and build a new domain?

The only proper way is to start from scratch server and client wise. But with AD, you should just be able to fire up a new DC, sync, transfer roles and demote the CC4 one, then all your accounts and permissions will remain the same.

[fiza]

The only proper way is to start from scratch server and client wise. But with AD, you should just be able to fire up a new DC, sync, transfer roles and demote the CC4 one, then all your accounts and permissions will remain the same.

 

So with CC4 is the underlying AD structure still sound? You don't need a brand new domain, with new user accounts etc?

[NB9457]

So with CC4 is the underlying AD structure still sound? You don't need a brand new domain, with new user accounts etc?

 

CC4 is just based around Active Directory, so for all user accounts you'd be fine adding a new DC and transferring roles.

[howartp]

Now why hadn't this occurred to me! I could attach the server and a host or two the staging network, they wouldn't have internet access but I could at least try and play with the GPOs without interfering with the rest of the network.

 

Exactly what we did 3 (?) years ago.

 

Separate VLAN within the VM environment, new DCs, etc.

 

Peter

[foofighterjim]

By the way, I haven't had time to reply to everyone but thanks to those who have sent me PMs, a lot of helpful information in a good number of them. Just to bring the thread into line with where we are now up to. We are almost certainly going the Vanilla route, I am certain that RM will lower their prices to try and keep us but unfortunately it may all be too little too late. So I'm thinking Vanilla Server 2016 on Hyper-V (possibly SAN as I'm not convinced of S2D if we ever have / need disparate server hardware), Veeam to NAS and latest data replicated to the could (as its purely for DR). Not 100% sure on SCCM or InTune at this point but am keeping an eye on them, especially if a good number of Chromebook like devices start coming to the market with InTune licences included.

 

The big question is Windows 10 and / or Windows 7. Some of our Netbooks will only run Windows 10 so we could never be completely Windows 7, so already we're juggling two sets of GPOs if we go Win 7, sounds like a less than ideal situation for a newbie vanilla team. Equally if we go Windows 10 we will be supporting an unfamiliar OS (from a GPO perspective) on an unfamiliar network the chances of us being anywhere near effective at identifying and resolving issues are remote. There is an abundance of documentation for us to dig into for Windows 7 problems, whereas Microsoft seem to introduce new issues & bizarre GPOs (or lack of, I'm looking at you Edge) with every release, there is also substantially less documentation to back it all up. I am still of the opinion that partnering with a 3rd party may be the way to go for us to give us a safety net but with us driving the design.

 

What I am going to do this week is setup a new VLAN and spin up a 2016 DC and a Windows 10 client, I'm going to play and see how far I can get with GPOs, possibly Sysprep and WDS. Out of interest how do people document GPOs? Is it just we have xGPO and it is intended to be used for X, Y and Z it is applied to this OU and these individual objects?

[Norphy]

Re Windows 7 or 10

 

IMO, Windows 10. Not because I think it’s better but simply because of the support situation.

 

Windows 7 is already in extended support and it only has a couple more years of it. If you put it in now, you’ll only have to repeat the rebuilding work in 18 months time. Better to get it out the way now and go with what’s current.

[foofighterjim]

Re Windows 7 or 10

 

IMO, Windows 10. Not because I think it’s better but simply because of the support situation.

 

Windows 7 is already in extended support and it only has a couple more years of it. If you put it in now, you’ll only have to repeat the rebuilding work in 18 months time. Better to get it out the way now and go with what’s current.

 

I completely agree but playing devils advocate; Windows 7 EOL January 2020, Windows 10 1709 EOL March 2019 (not sure if CB and CBB use the same EOL date), this is one of my major frustrations with WaaS I'm sure I'm not alone in this. As much as I think long term I must also approach this one with a good deal of short term planning.

 

I suppose that is the other question I have seen on here a few times; CB, CBB, or LTSB! My poor brain ()

[Norphy]

Current Branch and Current Branch for Business are deprecated terms, they've both been merged into the Semi Annual Channel. The tiers are now:

 

Insider Preview

Semi-Annual Channel

LTSC

 

The idea is that you decide when the releases on the SAC are ready for use, you don't sit around waiting for something to be promoted to the CBB.

 

https://blog.juriba.com/windows-10-branching-timeline

 

Putting aside the release channels, I still think that going to W10 is the way to go. Removing CC is going to be a fairly significant change. It could be argued that sticking with W7 will soften it but then then you'll be lumping another significant change on them when W7 goes out of support (which will hopefully be smoother than XP's EOL was!). W7 to W10 is a big one, W10 1710 to 1804 won't be.

 

We're also moving away from CC4 on W7 and the IT departments in our MAT decided that it would be better to go with one big change than two.

[cullingsh]

To add to this - we went the other way at stuck with Windows 7 - it has a fairly long support span still and made the process quicker - we knew the software we had would work (largely) and we were running out of time and didn't have time to get the policies in place for win10, whereas we had them already for win 7.

 

Trust-wide we will start tackling Win10 this Summer

[Norphy]

To add to this - we went the other way at stuck with Windows 7 - it has a fairly long support span still and made the process quicker - we knew the software we had would work (largely) and we were running out of time and didn't have time to get the policies in place for win10, whereas we had them already for win 7.

 

Trust-wide we will start tackling Win10 this Summer

 

That's the thing, it doesn't have a long support span left any more. Our new network is going live in September. Windows 7 will have less than 18 months of support left at that point so realistically, if we'd have decided to stick with W7 to being with, we'd have to tackle Windows 10 in Summer 2019 to make sure that we're still using supported operating systems going forward.

 

If we had started this project two or even one year ago, we may have stuck with Windows 7 but now, W10 is the way to go imo.