While Nancy’s existing Microsoft® Windows NT® 4.0 infrastructure functioned adequately, the company realized that its platform was nearing the end of its life cycle. Nancy’s had a single Windows NT 4.0 Domain with a Primary Domain Controller (PDC) and a Backup Domain Controller (BDC) that also hosts Microsoft Exchange 5.5. The primary function of the Windows NT 4.0 domain is to provide authentication for network resources, however, its limited group capabilities made it difficult for IT staff to efficiently control the desktop. The company also incurred licensing costs for a third party application it used for remote administration.
Nancy’s wanted to upgrade to a directory enabled environment to use the latest directory enabled applications like Microsoft Exchange 2003, improve IT staff’s control over the desktop, and reduce network management costs.
Partnering with Microsoft Gold Certified Solution Provider Allin Consulting, Nancy’s migrated its existing Windows NT 4.0 domain infrastructure to Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 and Active Directory® directory service. Three servers were deployed with Windows Server 2003, two built as Active Directory DCs that will also handle integrated DNS, WINS, and DCHP services. Two Windows NT 4.0 file and print servers were consolidated onto the third Windows Server 2003 server to function as a primary file server. Finally users, groups and workstation accounts will be migrated to the new Active Directory domain. Initially Nancy’s wanted to perform a domain migration, however, when Nancy’s considered the significantly reduced business pain and time required to do an in-place upgrade of its PDC and BDC, the company decided to go that route.
The team from Allin Consulting performed the in-place migration in about six hours, instead of the 60 to 70 that would have been required to perform a domain migration. It upgraded the operating system of the Windows NT 4.0 PDC to Windows Server 2003 and ran the Active Directory promotion process. Allin consultants used a newly built temporary Windows NT 4.0 BDC server for the in-place upgrade so that no production systems would be impacted. The new BDC server was installed with a vanilla Windows NT 4.0 installation and promoted to the PDC role, upgraded in-place to Windows Server 2003 and configured as the first Active Directory DC. Once Active Directory was configured, two cleanly built systems were ready to be promoted as the two production DCs that also hosted the internal Active Directory DNS namespace. The upgraded machine was demoted and removed from the network.
For a business the size of Nancy’s, the minimal disruption caused by such a smooth deployment constitutes a big benefit. “The domain in-place upgrade approach for
Windows NT 4.0 domain migrations is by far the most cost effective and simplest route for single domain environments that want to go to Active Directory,” says Mike Leece, Solution Director, Allin Consulting. “With this method Nancy’s saved time and money right from the outset.” New features in Windows Server 2003 also helped speed the deployment, including driver, hardware, and software compatibility checks that notified Leece that he had to upgrade a driver for the network card to work properly. The Configure Your Server wizard and the Automatic DNS Configuration feature enabled the team to install and configure the underlying operating system on each server in about one and a half hours.
Upgrading to Windows Server 2003 will augment the Microsoft Windows® 2000 and Windows® XP desktop features that couldn’t be used previously to take advantage of the greater synergies between the clients and Nancy’s new operating system, including Group Policies. Staff can define policies pertaining to groups of users and computers and assign a new setting to a group as a whole, instead of physically visiting each machine. Another new feature, Auto-Updates, automatically downloads security fixes to ensure that all desktops share the same up-to-date security status. Using the Remote Administration Console to manage its DCs from a central desktop is expected to save Nancy’s IT staff many hours a month. Nancy’s upgraded file and print server’s new Volume Shadow Copy Service provides the capability to restore newly created data that has not made it to the back up tapes which are run nightly. Finally, Nancy’s plans to use Terminal Services in Windows Server 2003 as the foundation for a new employee and customer portal, and will save more than US$10,000 in third-party license costs for this project alone.
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For more information about Nancy’s Specialty Foods, visit the Web site at: http://www.nancys.com/.
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