Dos and don'ts of Active Directory migrations |
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By Laura Hunter, SearchWindowsManageability.com Ask the Expert advisor
06 Feb 2003 | SearchWindowsManageability.com |
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I don't know what the weather is like where you reside, but this network administrator has been snowed under for the past few weeks with an Active Directory rollout. After many hours of planning and testing and a few long and sleepless weekends … voila, Network Nirvana. OK, so maybe it wasn't quite that simple. Here are a few tips I picked up along the way that you might find useful.
Do make sure that your support staff is brought up to speed before you begin migrating any production system. Depending on the size and structure of your organization, you should have a help desk staff taking support calls. For a complex project like Active Directory, it's a good idea to make a couple of network engineers available as well. Be sure to train all members of the support staff involved in the process. Otherwise, you'll have IT staff fielding questions that they don't know how to answer, and frustration will abound on all sides.
Do establish a test bed that mimics your production environment as closely as possible in terms of hardware specifications and network speed. Leave nothing to chance in the testing phase.
Don't automatically make the assumption that everything will function without any problems post-upgrade. All applications and processes need to be tested, tested and tested again.
Don't forget about any down-level clients that you may still be supporting. Windows 2000 and XP clients can use pure DNS for name resolution, but Windows 9x and NT still want to use NetBIOS and therefore require a WINS server or other mechanism to be in place. Also, test the physical placement of the PDC emulator FSMO so that everyone can still authenticate.
Don't overlook migration tools offered by Redmond when planning and performing your Active Directory upgrade. Sysprep will allow you to create Windows 2000 disk images for automated client rollouts, and the Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) is entirely useful in restructuring your NT4 domains (especially in a multi-domain model) into a viable Windows 2000 AD structure. See http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/tools/admt/default.asp for more information and detailed instructions. Though I found that ADMT more than did the trick in my case, depending on the complexity of your configuration, you may want to examine third-party migration tools offered by NetIQ, BindView and others.
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About the author: Laura Hunter is SearchWindowsManageability.com's resident expert on management tools and solutions, storage management and network security. She has spent many years working in the trenches of network design, administration and user support and has earned a myriad of vendor certifications, including MCSE, CNE and CCNA. She is presently a senior systems analyst for a major American university.
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