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Raventech Migration Case Study

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RavenTech, LLC will migrate all clients systems currently running the Microsoft Windows XP Operating System (OS) to a Linux-based OS. The migration will occur in discrete, well-defined, stages to allow for testing, validation and rollback as required. Users will experience the minimum amount of productivity interruption required to complete the migration. The overall migration plan consists of 7 steps: 1) Procedure Preparation, 2) Domain Modification, 3) User Data Migration, 4) Network Modifications, 5) Hardware Upgrades, 6) Linux OS Install & Migration and 7) XP OS Removal & Clean-up Tasks (Table 1). RavenTech management would like the migration to occur with minimal risk and cost to the business, however is willing to allocate a reasonable …show more content…

There are a total of 500 clients systems owned by RavenTech, LLC. They are evenly distributed between desktops and laptops, and between Windows 7 OS and Windows XP OS machines (Table 2). The Windows 7 machines are not being modified at this time, and will be primarily unaffected by this migration. The desktops and laptops that are currently running Windows XP were new at the time of purchase. While the hardware is older than the Windows 7 machines, it is still functional, and parts for these machines are still easily obtainable for the near future. The Windows XP computers have an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 processor in the desktop systems, and a P8400 processor in the laptop systems. The desktops and laptops each have 2GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM, and can be upgraded to at least 8GB DDR3 RAM. The laptops have a port for connecting an external monitor. Excluding the OS, RavenTech uses software applications that are available for Windows and Linux, or are cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS), so employee training on new productivity software will not be required. The company uses Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) and private IP space on the internal network. A minimum of one desktop XP machine …show more content…

The server specialists will create a full backup of the Domain Controller (DC) and all other servers on the network to an off-network storage medium. This will ensure that there is a known good configuration to roll back to incase issues arise due to configuration changes. The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) settings will be adjusted to provide network interface configuration information to hosts detected on the planned Linux VLAN. The DNS server configurations do not need to be changed, as the DNS server will respond to any DNS query it receives via IP. The servers will need to install the “Server for NFS” role (and associated feature), and modify the existing file shares to use the Network File System (NFS) with Kerberos v5 authentication and privacy and the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol (Microsoft, 2012). This will allow the Linux clients to securely access the same file shares that the Windows 7 clients are accessing. Some modifications to the AD database will be required to support resolving user and group names (Windows user properties) to User ID (UID) and Group ID (GID) (Linux user properties) (Banck, 2014). This entails adding certain Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) attributes for groups and

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