jayswarve

We are a private apprenticeship provider based in the UK with 41 academies including head office. Each academy range from 1 – 3 classrooms – with the exception of 2x 4 classroom academies. Classrooms have an average of 25 desktops in each. Our HO has around 40 staff. The board have asked us to look into moving all existing infrastructure to the cloud. As a result of this, we have been looking at combining Windows 10 with Office 365, Intune (EMS) and Azure Active Directory. The plan will also include some application deployments in Azure (Incl. our business-critical LMS/Portfolio application Maytas/E-Track). At the moment, each academy has its own isolated network with an on-site DC which runs DNS and DHCP. There is no site-to-site link at all. The DC runs active directory for the classroom PC’s on that site ONLY – we have no central active directory. ALL staff laptops/desktops across all academies + head office are either on a workgroup, or connected to Azure AD – head office is a mess as we have no control (i.e. AD DS) An MPLS solution has been at the top of the plan for months now, but after countless hours of reading, it appears SD-WAN is the way to go…especially as most of our infrastructure will be delivered as-a-service (Azure). However, we are still confused as to why we wouldn’t just simply set up a site-to-site VPN (Using Cisco Meraki or equivalent) instead of the SD-WAN solution? Please also bear in mind that we already have Office 365 E3 licenses which all staff currently use for email, sharepoint and Skype for Business. We are also looking to deploy Skype for Business as our PBX solution in the near future. What comms+WAN solution do you guys think best fits our design?

Thnaks, I'll check RichCopy out now! Have you dabbled with DFS Namespacess at all? From what I have read, this is almost an alternative to the CNAMEs?

Hi GTX and thanks for your reply, That was also suggested to me. I am going to look into this now. Does it matter that the destination DC has a different name to the source DC that I am replacing?

Good afternoon all, Right, I am replacing a physical 2012 R2 DC (which also runs File Server, DHCP, DNS etc.) because not only has the performance degraded massively, it is also now out of warranty. This is the ONLY server in the academy of 3 classrooms (2 equipped with PC's). I have promoted a new 2012 R2 (destination) server to DC and set up replication of the SYSVOL folders with DFS management (which is installed on the source server). I have also transferred all FSMO roles to the destination server. I am now stuck at the transferring files part... I was originally going to use File Server Migration Tools to transfer everything over, but it does state that this cannot be ran on a DC. I quite like the idea of having DFS namespaces, but hI'm still not sure this is the best solution. The source server contains learners home drives (etc.) which are created and mapped using a GPO and is sized around 200GB all together. What do you think the best solution is for completing the migration? Thanks