Removing RM CC4

[Andy2789]

Hi @mhaddock

 

We are settled onto our vanilla network, and can say that we would never look back! The performance difference, management and flexibility has been a huge transformation. We are now able to redevelop the network as required, we now run Windows 10 and with the lockdown were easily able to increase our remote functionality with no silly RM overheads.

 

I have found no con's to moving to vanilla, all I would say is that before you move across be sure you have tested your GPO's for your environment thoroughly. As you will be moving away from RM's bespoke policies, to a system entirely designed and 'locked down' by you. Moving away from RM we have found a lot of the problems we had were inherent with RM, and now with most issues a search of Edugeek normally finds the answer. I think the key as mentioned previously by others, is ensuring you have the capacity and knowledge within your team regarding Group Policies etc, as that basically is all RM is doing!

 

We purchased Impero for our classroom and network monitoring as well to replace the RM elements that Windows cannot replicate, and again have found this to work far better.

 

Just be sure to have fresh servers you are moving onto, we kept the domain that RM was using and removed any claws it had in it, but the entire server structure is brand new with nothing left behind. As we simply, built new servers while RM was running still, created new policies and slowly migrated a few across before over the Summer decommissioning the old servers and migrating work across and re-imaging all workstations.

 

It was a great learning curve for my team, who only knew RM and since removing again they have thrilled and developed as they now have the autonomy over their own network.

 

If you have any questions, just give me a shout

[JamesFish2020]

Hi @Andy2789

 

Are your servers physical or virtual?

 

Our infrastructure is virtual (VMware) and because of it's age will have to be replaced. We are a RM school and I have been tasked with at least "looking" at a vanilla setup with another company. Would love to do it myself but simply lack the expertise.

 

Are there any companies that you can recommend I approach? I have been reading this forum for a while now and find the tips useful.

 

Thanks

 

James

[Jcx500]

Hi @Andy2789

 

Are your servers physical or virtual?

 

Our infrastructure is virtual (VMware) and because of it's age will have to be replaced. We are a RM school and I have been tasked with at least "looking" at a vanilla setup with another company. Would love to do it myself but simply lack the expertise.

 

Are there any companies that you can recommend I approach? I have been reading this forum for a while now and find the tips useful. [emoji4]

 

Thanks

 

James

 

I would recommend Burconix if you are looking at a vanilla solution, there bcx management tools help you smoothly transition to a vanilla network with there management software,

 

 

https://www.burconix.com/software/overview

Edited July 3, 2020 by Jcx500

[foofighterjim]

Are there any companies that you can recommend I approach?

 

If you're looking for companies to help with a migration from CC4 to Vanilla I can honestly recommend CSE (https://www.cse-net.co.uk/), they did our migration in 2018 and despite me ending up in hospital during the install and off for a few weeks afterwards everything went very well. I'm not going to claim it was easy (especially for the member of my team suddenly left carrying the can) but with their help we got through it.

[simpsonj]

If you're looking for companies to help with a migration from CC4 to Vanilla I can honestly recommend CSE (https://www.cse-net.co.uk/), they did our migration in 2018 and despite me ending up in hospital during the install and off for a few weeks afterwards everything went very well. I'm not going to claim it was easy (especially for the member of my team suddenly left carrying the can) but with their help we got through it.

 

If you plan to use CSE, ask for Luke. And ensure they document everything they do.

[TechMonkey]

Hi @Andy2789

 

Are your servers physical or virtual?

 

Our infrastructure is virtual (VMware) and because of it's age will have to be replaced. We are a RM school and I have been tasked with at least "looking" at a vanilla setup with another company. Would love to do it myself but simply lack the expertise.

 

Are there any companies that you can recommend I approach? I have been reading this forum for a while now and find the tips useful.

 

Thanks

 

James

 

Depends on how much you want to do yourself and how much money you have? Any MSP will be able to build you a virtual setup and then with a bit of reading setting up things like the GPOs aren't hard, you just have to be methodical. Or if you have the money they will do a full migration for you.

 

I did it a long time ago, from CC3 to Vanilla. We got a company in to build the virtual infrastructure as we had never done anything like that and then I read a very large book and worked out what else we needed. Built the new domain and server, transferred documents and set up new accounts, though now you could probably create a trust relationship and transfer the accounts using the MS tools.

[djm968]

Are there any companies that you can recommend I approach?

 

I would highly recommend Ergo https://www.ergo.co.uk/ where are you based?

[Andy2789]

Sorry, late to the party! Covid is keeping me busy. In terms of recommendations for support from companies I am afraid I have never used one, I built the network from the ground up. When you say about lack the expertise, I would say is that down to time to do it rather than knowledge. As I would argue, you are managing a network now, moving from RM to vanilla isn't that painful. It goes from knowing where the setting in RM management is, to knowing where in Group Policy the setting you desire is.

 

Our environment is virtual, but we do replicate the domain to the physical hosts. If you are looking at moving, like we did we kept the original domain name and built everything new. If you build new servers outside of RM they don't see it, if you plan the project out. You can do a huge body of work while RM is still running, you can build the test policy and deployment and test it. Then when you are ready, move key roles like DNS, DHCP etc over to your new servers, decommission your RM Servers and migrate users over to how you want to work.

 

As others have also said, it depends if you want to start completely from scratch. Or build your new network off the side, for me if you have a domain with users named how you want. You may as well keep the domain, and create a new structure. All depends on how much of a mess things are.

 

If you want any help or pointers I am happy to help, as I said it all comes down to if you:

A - Want to do it yourself

B - Don't have the time, so need to outsource

C - Want to outsource and you have the money

D - Want the learning opportunity

[JamesFish2020]

Thanks Andy,

 

For me I would want to do all of that but as there are just two of us, used to be five, it's more of time poor than anything. I have been teaching myself the intricacies of Group Policies and have got to the stage of more or less being "comfortable" that I know what to do. That said, I would rather not learn the hard way and with just the two of us and a potentially busy school (ha!) I think it would be better if we brought in the expertise.

 

Besides, the Business Manager has assured me that there is money available for the project so I would like to take advantage of it to at least upgrade the hardware, which hasn't seen any real investment since a new SAN 2016.

 

But your points are perfectly valid and as we have at least a year to plan this I might well be "tapping you" and others for advice .

 

Regards

[JamesFish2020]

@djm968 I'm based just outside London in Bexley.

[djm968]

@djm968 I'm based just outside London in Bexley.

 

It might be worth checking with other Schools in your area if they have used and can recommend a local company. Most IT service companies should be able to build a new vanilla infrastructure and domain and migrate your data without any prior knowledge of RM (although it does help)

Edited July 6, 2020 by djm968

[TechMonkey]

@djm968 I'm based just outside London in Bexley.

 

I use ADM who are based in Canterbury but work all over, including London.

 

ADM-Computing

[Davit2005]

It might be worth checking with other Schools in your area if they have used and can recommend a local company. Most IT service companies should be able to build a new vanilla infrastructure and domain and migrate your data without any prior knowledge of RM (although it does help)

 

There is no need to build a whole new domain to remove RM to be honest. Just build new DC's without the RM installed. I did this with IT manager at my first school in 2010 and the only issue we had was that group policies were changing back to match the ones in RM console and this was linked to a RM user service account.

 

We also moved to mandatory profiles for students and local profiles for staff which solved a number of issues we were having at the time. The school staff were pretty happy with what we were doing as the existing IT solution/infrastructure was a car crash (that crashed every 6 weeks). But that is another story.

Edited July 9, 2020 by Davit2005

[djm968]

There is no need to build a whole new domain to remove RM to be honest. Just build new DC's without the RM installed. I did this with IT manager at my first school in 2010 and the only issue we had was that group policies were changing back to match the ones in RM console and this was linked to a RM user service account.

 

We also moved to mandatory profiles for students and local profiles for staff which solved a number of issues we were having at the time. The school staff were pretty happy with what we were doing as the existing IT solution/infrastructure was a car crash (that crashed every 6 weeks). But that is another story.

 

@JamesFish2020 is looking for companies that could do the migration work for him. I have also completed several CC3/CC4 to vanilla migrations over the last 25 years and I was just pointing out that any decent ICT service company should be able to do this work and they don't need any CC4 knowledge, they can just build you a new domain.

[Davit2005]

@JamesFish2020 is looking for companies that could do the migration work for him. I have also completed several CC3/CC4 to vanilla migrations over the last 25 years and I was just pointing out that any decent ICT service company should be able to do this work and they don't need any CC4 knowledge, they can just build you a new domain.

 

But there is no need to build a new domain with ALL the work that entails so a migration is not needed. I'd suggest getting someone that has done this process before and knows what to look for in the process.

 

If a new domain is built you need to migrate users over, groups, computers, deal with local/roaming profiles, file share permissions, etc.

 

If you read through what other people have successfully done in this post without building a new domain. I done this with my manager about 10 years ago from RM3.

Edited July 14, 2020 by Davit2005

[djm968]

But there is no need to build a new domain with ALL the work that entails so a migration is not needed. I'd suggest getting someone that has done this process before and knows what to look for in the process.

 

If a new domain is built you need to migrate users over, groups, computers, deal with local/roaming profiles, file share permissions, etc.

 

If you read through what other people have successfully done in this post without building a new domain. I done this with my manager about 10 years ago from RM3.

 

@JamesFish2020 is engaging a company to replace the entire server infrastructure, and if I was undertaking this project, it makes sense to me that you would build a new domain, but yes, you could just build a new vanilla DC, create a new OU structure and GPOs transfer the roles, then unpick all the RM rubbish, but my question would be why? Windows Server infrastructure, virtualisation, creating domains etc. are bread and butter for most companies, the migration phase of the project is easy and shouldn't take a decent Microsoft engineer anymore that a couple of hours to complete. A new domain built by a competent engineer and configured from scratch in my opinion would be a better option and this would be my recommendation.

Edited July 16, 2020 by djm968

[Davit2005]

@JamesFish2020 is engaging a company to replace the entire server infrastructure, and if I was undertaking this project, it makes sense to me that you would build a new domain, but yes, you could just build a new vanilla DC, create a new OU structure and GPOs transfer the roles, then unpick all the RM rubbish, but my question would be why? Windows Server infrastructure, virtualisation, creating domains etc. are bread and butter for most companies, the migration phase of the project is easy and shouldn't take a decent Microsoft engineer anymore that a couple of hours to complete. A new domain built by a competent engineer and configured from scratch in my opinion would be a better option and this would be my recommendation.

 

I am well aware of the easiness/flexibility of Virtualisation, creating domains etc. I've done them countless times. At a previous employment they had 68 servers still physical no documentation including file servers when I started and when I finished there were 150+ virtual servers all documented all but 2-3 of the the physical servers were migrated to updated MS software along the way from 2003 servers. And I'd managed to migrate students to Office 365 from onsite exchange and automate every AD/Office 365 account creation and document that too along with being technical leads on many other high level projects.

 

If an outside company is employed I'd strongly suggest that it is clear what they will NOT be responsible for and the documentation that will be left to be able to troubleshoot and manage the network as well as documenting what they have done.

 

The reason why I suggest not creating a new domain is if you find a company that has removed RM in the past they will probably know what service accounts will be making changes to Active Directory and where to look to remove the intergration. And depending on the setup this will be a lot easier than creating a new fresh AD domain. There are probably 3rd part tools that make the job easier.

 

RM may be integrated into AD in many places but if a company knows where to look it will make it a lot easier to break the connection.

Edited July 16, 2020 by Davit2005

[Cafanathaw]

Hi, I agree that a clean domain would be nice, but for a large complex organisation this may be too large a project to approach in a short time frame.

I am about to approach this myself, and I can see how easy it is going to be to build in a new domain controller, migrate the services, and destroy the rm member servers. Alongside this build new GPO and AD OU, and start to construct some meaningful policies. All well and good. However I have no idea what to do with the workstations.

In this installation we have around 2000 varied workstations, and then 300 totally unique workstations with different software on each one, the idea of just wiping these to remove rm is not my favourite path.

I have heard that you can disable RM at the workstation, by disabling a few services, uninstalling some apps, and running a script..which sounds ideal...does anyone have some more details on these services or applications, or a copy of the script that needs to be run.

I would much prefer to keep the software as is, and kill off RM (oh and I do mean kill off RM) than slash and burn the network.

[mikes]

Honestly that situation of yours sounds like a nightmare, why do the 300 workstations all have unique software on them in the first place?

All I needed to do was create an image, with base software built in (MS Office, SIMS.NET for laptops, and Adobe CS4), and then I only had specialized software packages per department (such as DT, or Serif for IT) - these are all in SCCM and auto-install with the workstation.

 

Manually removing all of the RM crap from each workstation, I don't even know if it's possible considering how RM hijack even the logon screen. They hijack how SCCM deploys software, and they have many layers on top of what MS had. I know you could de-commission a CC3 workstation with a script, which worked OK-ish, but with CC4 I can't see how.

Plus surely having these 300 machines remain unique is still a ballache?? Even our staff laptops - every piece of software that needs to be installed has a silent installer, if SCCM causes problems - I have a batch file I've written that installs software - a teacher just needs to ask for the visualizer software, and one command in Impero and I can do it from the office for any amount of stations.

 

Plus rejoining an RM machine to a new domain, that'll cause problems too surely? I'd honestly inventory the software that is being used. Create a central store with the installers. Rebuild each machine from scratch, then use SCCM or another tool to deploy it. At least the machines should run a lot nicer too, all that RM stuff honestly made the machines 70% slower than vanilla.

 

Our staff now use a lot of online stuff, so the software on each machine is minimal. Adobe, Serif, SIMS.net, visualiser software, I can't think of anything else that's needed now for generic use

[JamesFish2020]

...I would say is that down to time to do it rather than knowledge.

 

You are quite right it's more lack of time than knowledge. Note, this has not definitely been requested as yet but I have been asked, so have started the ball rolling. Just in case!

 

But in truth this has been part of my plan for a while now, so am gathering resources etc. to at least begin the process.

[beaslpe]

We are currently in the process of moving from CC4 and moving to a Vanilla network, we were recommended CSE who have built a new domain for us and completed the majority of the work for the cost of the RM contracts we had in place. We had so many issues with the CC4 build on our devices and found it was killing log in times, we have gone from minutes to seconds in terms of log in times.