Windows 7 upgrade?

[sippo]

How many of you 'geeks' out-there have upgraded to windows 7?

 

I really want to upgrade all our servers to 2008, and our workstations to win7. I really don't want to do it in dribs and drabs, it will have to be all or nothing. We as a school don't want to be 'left behind', but the funds just aren't there to upgrade- we have approx 500 PC's. With most needing upgrading to win7 spec.

 

My question is do I go to SMT and try and get the money to upgrade, or hold back a few years? I must mention that I work on my own, after two fellow collegues left and the school aren't replacing them!!

[3s-gtech]

I'd seriously recommend a phased update to Windows 7 - at least with a test suite. You just can't catch all the bugs with a test VM, it's in normal use that things really pop up. Do you have any Windows 7 machines yet? If not, you'll probably have a lot of GP tweaking, mandatory profile building, permissions editing etc to do. Bear in mind you'll really want 2008 R2, and it's 64bit only (not many of my servers will run it, but my main DC and my virtual host do).

[jsnetman]

If the money is not there to do it all at once, what is wrong with doing it gradually. Thats what we have done here, most stations are on win7 but about half the laptops are still on xp, either because the teachers don't bring them in for an upgrade or the laptop just won't take 7. It's far better to do it gradually so your not putting all your eggs into one basket so to speak. XP and win 7 will live happily next to each other albeit in different OU's. Edited November 9, 2010 by jsnetman

[sippo]

I think the difficulty I'll have is managing it. Being on my own, I haven't the time to test, implement etc..

[mrbios]

Setup a 2008R2 DC, seperate from your current domain, have a windows 7 client on it and test test test for months, i did at least 7 months of nonstop testing, various registry tweaks and other assorted changes before rolling it out, there's a lot to change in a switch.

 

Personally between two of us (3 work here but one doesn't do any of the work) we managed to roll out windows 7 in the space of 2 weeks over around 600 machines. Windows deployment services setup for one touch setup is your friend! Pre configure all your GPOs ready to be activated, setup profiles ready to be used (as windows 7 uses .v2 folder names for profiles, depends how you do your profiles really but we have mandatory profiles mainly with a few roaming so had to do a fair bit of setup for it)

 

In the past 6 months i've switched all but 3 of our servers to 2008R2 servers (11DCs, 1 File server, multiple VMs doing different jobs) by me alone so it can certainly be done by one person in the sense of the work involved, your only issue then is the little jobs that i didn't have to deal with thanks to having other members of staff, just plan well and test a lot before even touching your live network - speak to SMT about having a planned time scale each day or a weekly slot where your time is booked for this alone, if that's possible?

 

EDIT: noticed i didn't really cover your machine specs, what are they at the moment?

 

Also aren't there guidlines as to how many IT support staff there should be in relation to the amount of computers you have to manage? Surely 1 man to 500 machines is a bit excessive, you want to get some peoples ears bleeding over getting at least one more tech!

Edited November 9, 2010 by mrbios

[dhoward_westexetc]

We're phasing ours in - staff laptops ongoing after we had new ones delivered, staff desktops when we roll them out in Easter time, and student machines during the summer holidays hopefully.

 

What helped was I spent months developing policies to work on both XP and Vista, the latter we never rolled out, in a separate test environment, which we rolled out over the summer of 2008. Thus we already have GPOs that roughly work on both XP and Windows 7, but with some tweaking obviously for IE 8.

 

Try your clients with Windows 7 SP1 RC, since you'll be rolling out your machines with Windows 7 SP1. Use the EduGeek ADM template to disable things like Control Panel on the desktop, and deny students access to the Public User folder on each client (do this in your base image); this stops the Public documents being added to their libraries, and makes it more responsive.