AD Migration Commandment I - Know Thy Infrastructure

So you want to migrate off of your old NT 4.0 domain or domains on to an Active Directory based Windows 2003 domain or maybe you just want to upgrade from 2000 to 2003. Well you might be asking yourself “where do I start?” Well my friends start with what you have; you do know what you have, right? Well don’t feel too bad if you don’t, because a good percentage of SE’s and SA’s do not have a well documented infrastructure.

If you are part of that very small, minute percentage of folks without documentation (yeah right), your best bet is to start YESTERDAY, ok well maybe this afternoon. The more documentation you have, the simpler it is to plan for your migration.

Ideally, you would like to have:

• A diagram of your current domain topology.
• A current network diagram
• List of all servers with their:
• roles
• hardware configuration
• IP configuration
• disk capacity and amount of free space
• type of OS and any hot fixes or patches that are loaded
• applications that are loaded
• location (very important)
• List of special server based applications and their users
• Current list of users, their location and the location of their individual data and if necessary their roaming profiles. (If you know if they are day or evening workers, that info can come in handy also!)
• List of all client workstations with their:
• location (even more important for workstations)
• hardware configuration
• disk capacity and amount of free space
• type of OS and any hot fixes or patches that are loaded
• applications that are loaded
• Topology of other systems (i.e. UNIX, NetWare, LINUX, etc.) that are maintained in a hybrid network, that your system directly affects. (You may want to include the SE’s for these systems in your planning phase, your migration won’t be a success if you break everything else in the organization)

Once you have a clear picture of what your infrastructure looks like and contains, you can better plan for your migration. With all this data in front of you, it is easier to answer questions like “Should we perform an in-place upgrade or do we migrate to a new domain?”, “Do we need to upgrade our hardware before migration?”, “Do we need to make plans for dinner, or dinner and breakfast during the migration?”. Although no migrations are perfect, you want to arm yourself as best as possible to prepare for about 90% of the problems that may occur.

Next Time: AD Migration Commandment II – He (or she) Who Do Not Plan-eth get Pink Slip-eth.