Linux Migrations:

Running a Microsoft Windows NT server these days is a brave (or, perhaps, stupid) thing to do: Support for the product has finished, and as far as Microsoft is concerned, the product should be put in a rest home for retired software. Windows Server 2000 is also getting long in the tooth, and in a few years it too will reach the end of its support lifecycle and be looking for its rocking chair and slippers.

So if you work for one of the many organizations around the world still running NT and 2000, like it or not, you are soon going to have to migrate to another operating system.

There are many reasons to consider migrating some or all of your data center servers to Linux, and we won't go into them here. But if you do decide to go open source, some ways of going about it are better than others.

It may sound boring and trite, but the one thing which may dictate the success or failure of a whole migration project is the initial planning stage. Before you can embark on a migration (any migration), you must decide the scope of the project. Are you planning to migrate only the Windows NT file and print servers and domain controllers to Linux, for example, or do you plan in the longer term to move your entire IT infrastructure (including Web and application servers and user desktops) to Linux?

For the initial phase, it's vital to build up a clear picture of what servers you will be replacing, what tasks they currently perform, and how they will accomplish those tasks using Linux.

The answers to these questions, together with the expertise of the Webangel staff, will help determine which Linux distribution to adopt.

The next step is to estimate an approximate cost and time scale for the planned migration. The best way to do this is to break down the migration into as many manageable tasks as you can, and estimate a time and cost for each of these. The more detail you go into when describing these tasks, the more accurate your estimates are likely to be.

Later, in the pilot phase, the estimates can be checked and updated with the generated data.