Windows Server vs Novell.. Pls help.

Hello all!

I am running Novell servers at my job and I would LOOOOVE to move over to Windows Server.

I want to compile a letter of recommendation to my boss to convince him to move over to Windows.

The biggest con that I have with Novell is they stopped hardware support about a year ago.

Running windows servers would be so much easier to manage and control.

Can anyone help me with pros and cons to switching over to M$?

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Comments

tiersten

Are you aware how much work would be involved in migrating from Novell to Windows? Its not just a case of reinstalling the server.

Novell what anyway? They do lots of different products.

MAC_Addy

Oh I definitely know what I'm going to be doing.

But that's okay. I work for a school district and that will be my summer project.

It's Novell Netware.

RobertKaucher

Cool Solutions: eDirectory and NetWare vs. Active Directory and Windows
Comparing Microsoft Active Directory to Novell's NDS

I have nearly 0 exposure to Netware... So I can only offer up a few articles.

Non-Profit Techie

here is a case study Microsoft did on our school district. We were the first school district in the country to go full Server 2008 before the release. No problems to date.

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000001406

tiersten

Ahh. In that case then yeah the usual benefits apply. Although it is sort of supported as OES now which are the Netware services running on top of Linux.

What are the clients running?

Its newer. Its actually maintained (thats not OES). Its the industry standard now so the staff and students will get valuable experience. You should be able to do central management. Microsoft like doing special migration deals for big organisations and especially educational ones.

Downsides would be that its a huge summer project for you

You'll have tech support hell for years because people will complain that its different.

MAC_Addy

Bah!

There won't be any tech support hell really!

To the end users it'll be just a different login screen.

Huge summer project FTW!!

Hyper-Me

Non-Profit Techie wrote: »

here is a case study Microsoft did on our school district. We were the first school district in the country to go full Server 2008 before the release. No problems to date.

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000001406

Why would anyone want to put all their eggs into a pre-release basket?

:

Anyway, what size of a district are we talking about here, jamie.english?

Remember that you will also need to touch each machine to bind them to the new domain. Thats a lot of man hours if you have a lot of machines.

royal

What's Novell?

dynamik

royal wrote: »

What's Novell?

Glad to see you still got it!

petedude

dynamik wrote: »

Glad to see you still get it!

"Get" what?

Novell makes good products, but they're starting to overcharge and under-deliver, which is suicidal given their tendency to under-market as well.

I think non-profits, government agencies and public entities such as schools would be better served to stay with Novell as long as they can get good pricing. A move to OES with NetWare VMs is a lot of work, but should be less work than throwing out everything on the server side to start over with Microsoft.

If you only have a couple NetWare file and print servers, why not try other Linux flavors like CentOS as a replacement for those?

MAC_Addy

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Anyway, what size of a district are we talking about here, jamie.english?

We have 28 schools.

Anywhere between 100 - 350 people per school.

There are 4 techs.

Plus each of us have a Technology Liaison per school, so they can help with anything.

I know I'll have to go to every machine and join to the domain and remove novell.

Hyper-Me

We have about 350-450 machines per building and it takes 25 people about 3 days to fully migrate all those machines to an AD domain, about half of those machines are freshly imaged, half are joined and profiles migrated.

I think raw man hours in manually touching every machine will be your biggest hurdle, overall.

MAC_Addy

Yeh I agree.

I've got 5 different Dell machines in my office, so I can setup the domain and all the information to run on Windows, image them and then deploy the image. That way I can just ghost everything.

dales

You may find that the bottom line is very prohibitive in migrating from NW to AD, a while ago we figured that our licencing costs and purchases in our novell environment were about a 1/3 of what an MS shop would cost. Things sure are alot easier with AD (especially if you are using NW6.5 rather than OES etc. However I dont think the migration would be any more hurt than any other migration, there are a few tools that may help you out and perhaps depending on size of userbase you could switch on roaming profiles for a while to help with wipe and load desktops.

Pros.
Simpler admin
Lower cost of IT staff
higher compatibility with third party products (although AD is not true LDAP so you might want to check that out with any internal services you run)

Cons.
well theres loads but you want to make this list short I guess if you want to move to AD.

I assume you are using groupwise, if you are there is no real need to move away from that (unless you like spending your whole day restoring broken PST files)

darkerosxx

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Why would anyone want to put all their eggs into a pre-release basket? :

Must have been some crazy circumstances to allow an entire school district to run on an unreleased OS, even if it is Windows.

Hyper-Me

darkerosxx wrote: »

Must have been some crazy circumstances to allow an entire school district to run on an unreleased OS, even if it is Windows.

Possibly. I think MS gives deep discounts for customers who pilot their near-release stuff.

I know when the entire state of Kentucky's education department did a state-wide AD Forest, they used pre-release 2003. (this was obviously some time ago, lol)

MAC_Addy

What do you think the major cons would be to switching to Windows Server?

I'm going to write this letter soon, it's going to need a couple of cons.

Hyper-Me

licensing and the man hours needed for the conversation are the biggest cons that I see.

jibbajabba

Hyper-Me wrote: »

licensing

First thing which popped into my mind but when I read 'school district' then I don't see an issue. We are SPLA partner and the license cost for the public sector is silly cheap ... Windows 2008 Standard was something like $1 / month or so .. Or MSSQL Standard for example .. MSSQL 2005 Enterprise is via SPLA around $1k / month where the public sector one was 5% of that .. I don't know the exact numbers anymore - but I am pretty sure license cost isn't an issue unless the deciding person only looks at OEM or retail pricing so you must do your homework !!

Hyper-Me

Gomjaba wrote: »

First thing which popped into my mind but when I read 'school district' then I don't see an issue. We are SPLA partner and the license cost for the public sector is silly cheap ... Windows 2008 Standard was something like $1 / month or so .. Or MSSQL Standard for example .. MSSQL 2005 Enterprise is via SPLA around $1k / month where the public sector one was 5% of that .. I don't know the exact numbers anymore - but I am pretty sure license cost isn't an issue unless the deciding person only looks at OEM or retail pricing so you must do your homework !!

Ive worked for very large school district for the past 3 years and you are right that licensing is dirt cheap, but its still spending money vs not spending money and with the budget shortfalls that a lot of school systems are facing it might get nixed solely on the basis of cost.