Need people who have gone through a Novell Netware to Active Directory migration

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cyr0n_k0r

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I am looking for IT administrators that have taken their enterprise from a Novell Netware environment (preferably 6.5 or newer) and successfully migrated it to an Active Directory and Exchange environment.

I am in the very early planning stages and I want to get all the info I can about a migration of ~80 servers, 1000 employees.

I am confident that I can deploy AD and Exchange, but I have limited experience with Novell. I want to know all I can before I present things to my superiors.
 
A lot of this depends on your current workstation environment. We have netware 6.5 ( sp5 I believe ) + zenworks 7. As I migrate workstations over to AD, I am uninstalling zenworks and letting AD do it's GPO thing.

For user syncronization, we are using DirXML ( although I understand there is an MS product out for this. MSDSS? Not sure of the exact name, I'll check it out at work ). We are currently doing one way sync ( from netware to AD ), but when the workstations are converted we'll pull the plug and go all AD.

File system migration is going to be a trickier issue; the permissions are all NDS. I was planning on migrating it over in chunks, and manually resetting permissions ( as there will have to be a translation between NDS and AD ).
 
Is it as easy as just setting up your file storage on the windows side, setting permissions on the folder then copying things over from the old NDS stuff?

I'm reading and with my own AD automation scripts I have I do not see very many issues with user migration and group policy, folder redirection, etc.

The storage though is something I'm not sure yet how to migrate.
Also, are there tools to get email from Groupwise over into Exchange?
 
File migration; The problem for us is the absolute rats nest of permissions that have evolved over the years. Everyone needs special access to everything else; it's a mess.

Groupwise to Exchange; for us this won't be an issue. We're going to run them in parallel. We have company policy that email is deleted after 90 days, so we just keep them both up during that time period and then shut off groupwise.
 
I am deep into a migration. We run about 60 Netware 6.5 sp 7 servers. All are running zenworks 7. We alrady had exchange so we did not migrate off of groupwise. We are a large school district. We have 12,000 workstations and 40,000 (5,000 staff and 35,000 Students.). We sync Edirectory with Active directory using Idenity Manager. With a few well thought out scripts we migrated all of our staff and student data (home and shared) off a netware cluster. We do have the luxury of very few staff and students around for 3 months. All of our workstations are in AD and they all have the novell client as well. For desktop managment on the AD side we are using Zenworks 10. It seems to work well.

File system rights where pretty easy for us. 99% of our file rights in NDS where either RF or RWECMF. Those translate to read & excute or Modify in the NTFS world. File rights get a little more tricky if you are going to use ABE (access based enumeration). File rights do not flow back up the file tree in NTFS. If a user has access to \\server\share\folder, with abe they can not browse to that folder if they do not have read to \\server\share. I hope that makes since.

Let me know if you have any other questions.
 
I did both Novell NetWare and Microsoft Windows back in the 90's and I always thought NDS was better than Active Directory - still do. I wish Microsoft would have licensed that technology instead. I hate AD. Once you've used other X.500-'ish based directories, you realize how bad AD is. But then again, the best always doesn't win. I liked Beta more than VHS and I liked HD-DVD more than Blu-Ray.

Sometimes marketing and $$ is all that matters.
 
Valnar said:
I did both Novell NetWare and Microsoft Windows back in the 90's and I always thought NDS was better than Active Directory - still do. I wish Microsoft would have licensed that technology instead. I hate AD. Once you've used other X.500-'ish based directories, you realize how bad AD is. But then again, the best always doesn't win. I liked Beta more than VHS and I liked HD-DVD more than Blu-Ray.
Click to expand...
Eh, maybe it's my lack of experience in large organizations, but having worked with AD and NDS, I far prefer MS's solutions to novell's. Novell's management tools stink, and their workstation client does bad things to a Windows XP machine.

I understand NDS scales far better than AD, but honestly this won't be an issue in 99% of the implementations out there.
 
XOR != OR said:
Novell's management tools stink, and their workstation client does bad things to a Windows XP machine.
Click to expand...

I don't disagree with that statement. The NDS people wrote good code. It's too bad their interface people sucked.
 
For those that are currently into a migration, what were your reasons for switching?
This project is also for a public school district and I am attempting to show that switching to an Active Directory / Exchange environment will in the long run actually be cheaper.

Can anyone demonstrate that as a true statement? Do you agree that getting rid of Novell will save money?

I just can't imagine that a client software that already sits on top of an XP install, along with all the modules that need to be bought as addons for Netware that it is cheaper than running an AD domain that is technically free if you just buy the server licenses. All the stuff needed is already included in the OS. Active Directory, group policy, WDS or RIS for imaging, remote assistance, DNS, DHCP, etc.
Plus it looks like this place is already paying the license fees for office on every computer, so outlook is already there, the only thing we actually need to spend money on is the Exchange license, mailboxes, and a few extra server licenses.
 
Unfortunately, licensing being what it is you are the only one who can answer that question. Yes, pure AD can be cheaper ( especially for schools ), but then novell has been known to cut deals.

If you wanted to make a case for "cheaper", I'd focus instead on administration costs. Show how easy it is to get AD administrators compared to novell administrators. I would also mention the shear size of the installation base of each product, highlighting that most common problems would have been solved by now with AD. That may not be true with NDS ( I know I've run into a few issues where it appears I was the first to experience it ). I would also highlight how most software vendors are keyed to work with AD, not novell.

But again, you are in the situation and have access to the data you need to make your case.
 
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