Chapter 5: Stabilizing the Novell to Windows Server 2003 Migration Solution

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Introduction and Goals Introduction and Goals
Conducting the Pilot Conducting the Pilot
Migration Pilot Migration Pilot

Introduction and Goals

The purpose of the Stabilizing Phase is to improve the solution quality to a level that meets the acceptance criteria for release to production. Stabilizing Phase testing emphasizes usage and operation under realistic environmental conditions. The team focuses on prioritizing the bugs that testing discovers, fixing those with the highest priority, and preparing the solution for release.

When a build has been deemed stable enough to be a release candidate and preproduction testing is complete, the team deploys the solution to one or more pilot groups in the production environment.

Major Tasks and Deliverables

The two major Stabilizing Phase tasks that are relevant to migration projects are:

  • Conducting the pilot

  • Testing the solution

The content of this chapter provides the technical information needed to enable teams to accomplish these tasks. Refer to the UMPG for general project guidance on how team members and work processes should be organized to complete this phase.

Stabilizing Phase Major Milestone: Release Readiness Approved

The phase culminates in the fourth major milestone, Release Readiness Approved. Passing the milestone indicates team and customer agreement that all outstanding issues have been addressed and the design and process are ready for implementation.

Conducting the Pilot

When the design components and migration process have been fully tested in the isolated environment, it is time to introduce them in the production environment as part of a pilot. There are three major steps to conducting the pilot: building the new server structure, setting up synchronization, and migrating pilot data.

The pilot data set should represent a cross section of data types as well as samples of potentially problematic data. In many environments, this will involve the migration of a specific file server, or a single volume on a file server. The goal of the pilot stage is to uncover any problems in the process or environment before they impact the entire data set. The pilot data set should include users, groups, printers, files, and the permissions on those files.

Migration Pilot

This section outlines the processes that you need to do beyond the prototyping steps for your Pilot using either the manual or automated migration methods. Refer to Chapter 4: Migrating – Prototyping the Migration to Windows Server 2003 for the prototyping steps.

Manual Migration

If a manual migration process was selected during the Planning Phase, a certain degree of complexity is removed from the process. Set up a Pilot by following the prototyping steps and these additional key steps:

  • Identify the Pilot test group of users and the data that will be migrated. This may consist of a server or a single NetWare volume.

  • Create equivalent users and groups in Active Directory to match the old Users and Groups in NetWare.

  • Migrate client functionality for the Pilot test group of users, either through a manual removal of the Client32 software, or a modification of the existing login scripts to map the migrated volume or server to its new location in Active Directory. In addition, the clients must be configured to login using their new Active Directory user names.

  • Remove access to the old NetWare volume or server either by dismounting the volume migrated or shutting down the server. This will prevent a situation in which file data is modified in two places.

Upon migration, pilot users should be given instruction on how to work in the new environment, such as how to change their password upon login or how to access the pilot data that has been moved. In addition, you will need to plan for a scenario where production data resides in two places for the duration of the pilot. Pilot data will reside on a Windows share which must be accessible to all users who need access to it. The rest of the nonmigrated data will still consist of the balance of your NetWare file volumes, which will need to be accessible to migrated pilot users as well.

Automated Migration using Services for NetWare 5.03

Follow the prototype steps with the pilot users and pilot data.

  • Set Up Directory Synchronization

  • Migrate Pilot Data with the File Migration Utility (FMU)

Automated Migration Using Quest

Follow the prototype steps with the pilot users and pilot data.

  • Installing Quest NDS Migrator

  • Using Quest NDS Migrator

Password Synchronization

Follow the prototype steps with the pilot users and pilot data.

File Migration

Follow the prototype steps with the pilot users and pilot data.

Printer Migration

Follow the prototype steps with the pilot users and pilot data.