Windows-to-Linux. Large Installations Handling the Changeover? 29
Cathal asks: "Okay. I am a senior in a large Irish university, which is a mostly Microsoft house. As a member of the college computer society, I have heard that the college bean-counters want to reduce the cost of the IT dept. The IT dept are 'thinking' of turning to Linux as a method of cutting costs and improving the service to the staff and the students. I am looking for suggestions and feedback on previous experience in similar situations, (large changeovers, support)."
"What the college supports at the moment: - 9000 Undergrads
- 2500 Postgrads
- 3000 part-time students - night classes
- About 1500 staff and lecturers
- Print farm to support the above, with network printers available in each of the 40 or so computer labs around the place.
- About 25 webservers with a combination of IIS, Apache(win32) and Apache(solaris)
- 300-400 student computers in the on-campus accomodation
College resources:
- About 2500 desktops in the college, at the moment with msoffice on win2k
- A collection of fileservers, and mailservers, (mostly Dell poweredges)
- Fiber backbone, 100Mbit switches, 100Mbit to most desktops, and a 20Mbit connection to net backbone (to go to 125Mbit next year)
My little exerience.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know that it's really worthwhile changing a large user base over from what they currently use (I know that at my uni the amount of windows specific apps for lecturers and other staff is pretty phenomenal). Also you probably have a lot of lab's which require windows specific software (like those wonderful first year "this is MS Office" papers).
Of course you could talk to Redhat, and then MS and see what MS will do to beat Redhat.. (now where's that asbestos suit?).
This is just what I have learnt from helping at two educational institutes. Hope it helps.
Re:My little exerience.. (Score:2)
-Peter
Re:My little exerience.. (Score:2, Insightful)
IBM (Score:2, Insightful)
Replacing MSOffice looks like the biggest hurdle to me. StarOffice is really the only complete alternative available. Maybe StarOffice 6 will actually be good enough [techtv.com].
StarOffice (Score:1)
Re:IBM (Score:1)
According to the Eolach Open Source News Worth Knowing newsletter that I received yesterday, they just went tits up.
Re:IBM (Score:1)
sun bought them (Score:2)
hawk, economist, and advocate of the side effects of greed and spite
Show them it will work (Score:1)
Just my $0.02
Have you investigated remote display? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you must replace the desktops, you'll have a tougher task. If you don't solicit feedback and get positive response from the users, I'd tread carefully.
One way to ease the transition if you do whack the desktops is to provide a remote display service so that a couple of beefy Win2K boxes will supply the apps that people are currently used to -- that way you're not the bad guy, the support problem is centralized, and the performance is decreased enough that end-users will want to find Linux solutions.
VNC is an option in this direction -- there's also apparently a Citrix ICA client for Linux.
HTH,
Re:Have you investigated remote display? (Score:1)
Linux/Staroffice cannot replace Windows/MSOffice completely, in any combination.
[Disclaimer: I work for Tarantella]
all at once or one at a time? (Score:2, Informative)
i'm sure there are plenty of guides to migrating over to servers, so i won't blab about it here, but for the lab migration i'd think about doing it one lab at a time, maybe taking the second most used lab and switching it, and then seeing what goes wrong/right with it. then use that as a kind of planner for how to migrate the other labs.
Don't do it. (Score:5, Informative)
But: I would not even consider what you are planning. You are considering computer costs, but not user costs. The costs of running the computing infrastructure (licensing, hardware, maintenance) are only some of the costs involved, and they are the small costs.
The large costs are the cost of retraining 9000+ users. This is something you should not underestimate. Are those users going to be happy when they are running late, but can't figure out how to make Star Office (or whatever else) do what they know how to do in Word? Absolutely not.
Some of the ENTERPRISE level problems with Linux currently:
1) Think about directories. Any enterprise not implementing some sort of enterprise-wide directory needs to fire thier CTO. You need one source of information on all users that is stored in a central place and can be used by all applications. Sadly, MS is much closer to this then Linux right now. (Don't say "LDAP", either, since it is not supported in many applications - like kde/shell/whatever-else login!)
2) Think about remote access. I've not been impressed by Linux's support for VPN. It's much better today then it was 3 or 4 years ago, but it is not done yet. If you use Windows, it comes out of the box (PPTP or, for the more security minded, L2TP). If you don't like either MS option, buy a third party option.
3) Think about exchanging data. Ask your userbase how much data they exchange and with who. You might find that "PowerPoint Clone" isn't good enough. It doesn't matter why it isn't good enough - the fact is that people who exchange documents and require the document's formatting to be exchanged intact need to run the same program as the sender.
4) Think about what your users know already. The less you have to change things, the better from thier standpoint.
5) Think about databases. If you are really that large of a university, you will need some centrally administered databases. Databases which support huge datasets, stored procedures, transactions, foreign keys, etc. You might argue for PostgresSQL, but it won't stand up unless you find some reporting applications and such for the clients. Don't say Oracle, either, since Oracle on Linux is missing many features found in thier NT and Solaris offerings.
6) Think about wierd hardware and integration with legacy machines. Right now, you do have that integration - in some way you can talk to all your machines. Make sure you don't break that. Think about people like EE and Physics, too, who might have some very wierd things hooked up to thier machines.
Good luck - don't make the decision based on what either the Linux or MS lobby says. Instead, figure out where your enterprise needs to be 5 years from now and pick the software that supports the majority of the needs. Sadly, it may be MS software, since it does support directories, remote access, data exchange, existing user knowledge, databases, wierd hardware, and integration with other systems. Linux supports some of these, but does it support all of them?
I haven't even mentioned things like PKI (not certificates, but actual infrastructure - things like automatic certificate renewal), wierd applications, etc, which I'm sure you'll figure out if you do a large scale study of where you want to be tomorrow.
Do it! was Re:Don't do it. (Score:2, Interesting)
LDAP and PAM should be able to do the job
2. remote access. freeswan, CIPE, ssh
3. open standards for file formats should be ncouraged. PDF if nothing else.
4. college is where they should learn, linux is great if you want to learn about computers, not so great if you just want to memorized one way of doing things.
5) which features are missing? If you find linux/postgres inadequate stick with oracle on solaris. you can still dump NT. Stay away from SQL server.
6)wierd hardware - case by case.
linux is the platform of choice for open source software development.
Don't go into this planning on replacing every MS box but you should be able to get rid of most of the servers painlessly. Just make sure you don't upgrade any desktops to later more restrictive licensing from MS. Take labs and individuals on a case by case basis. Setup a mirror and manage updates automatically. (autorpm, autoupdate, up2date) Mass deploy staroffice on linux/windows and solaris. upgrade to staroffice 6.0 when released.
Linux directory solution (Score:2, Informative)
It is, in fact, the best directory solution out there.
Take a look at CNN's web-site sometime and see the little Novell logo in the bottom right-hand corner. eDirectory was the only thing which could handle their subscriber base.
I've heard rumors that Yahoo's using it too, but can't confirm.
Re:Don't do it. (Score:1)
I think you may be wrong about Oracle on Linux however. What features (other than client GUIs, which can be run from anywhere) aren't available on Linux? A counter-example: clustering [oracle.com].
I suspect that even if they don't replace Windows in one stroke that they will find many opportunities to reduce costs with Linux.
Re:Don't do it. (Score:1)
Doesn't Oracle develop their new implementation of their database products on linux first now?
Re:Don't do it. (Score:1)
I've done some development with Oracle on Linux and quite a bit on Solaris. Linux seems just as capable an environment for Oracle. I've also spoken to people who have experience scaling Oracle on Linux and have gotten good reviews.
For much more, check out the oracle-on-linux mailing list [yahoo.com]. And here's a page at Oracle [oracle.com] that says Linux is supported "across the entire technology stack".
But I don't want to plug Oracle on Linux too hard. You (for 95% of "you") probably don't really need to pay Ellison's sky high licensing fees. PostgreSQL [postgresql.org] really is quite good now and more than sufficient for most database applications, most of which barely scratch the surface of Oracle's scalability and capabilities.
Oracle and Linux (Score:1)
Linux is now one of the Oracle strategic platforms (with solaris and NT). The support is at least as good as NT. Some tests have proved that performance is better with Linux. There are NO features missing in the last version of Oracle for Linux. It even includes all the GUI applications (Enterprise manager). I have had many good experiences with it. They are now bringing their dev. tools to Linux (JDeveloper is coming out soon)...
I hope this clears it up
Quentin
Hey Cathal... (Score:1)
Suggestions... (Score:2)
I don't have any experience in Linux installation of that scale, but I still have some suggestions:
This kind of a phased approach should make things a lot easier and it'll be easier to sell to the administration. They can always back out or slow things down if there are problems. Also, if you phase it in over two years, by the time you get to your toughest customers - the admin staff - the Linux desktop interface and applications will have matured another generation.
Re:Suggestions... (Score:2)
I guess you have to look at those one by one. I don't know anything about about Chili!ASP, but presumably it could be used to support legacy code that can't be ported easily. Other apps. could probably be replaced with PHP or Perl. If none of that is feasible then it might be necessary to keep the odd Windows box around for a few years.
In any case, it's no reason to avoid switching. You just have to plan things out properly.
Terminal Server and Linux Thin Clients (Score:1)
For the desktops I put together a Linux build using Linux From Scratch, including X-Windows and the Metaframe client. At first I tried to get it running on a bootable CD, but had some issues with it. I built an NFS server which serves a root image for each of the types of system we have in the building (4 types x 2 video modes). Luckily, we don't have very many types of hardware, but there could be a set of scripts to determine hardware type before booting is complete. By using a bootable CD (using ISOLINUX), we can revert to the NT systems in an emergency (Metaframe on Win2000 can crash occasionaly). Also, since the server could crash, I put together an exact duplicate of the system and wrote scripts to switch to the other server in the case of a failure, by simply setting up an additional IP on the server's NIC.
I also began to put together a firewall using Linux to replace our Firewall-1 on WinNT, but my boss chose to purchase a Firebox since it is easier to configure and set up. I found out that the Firebox is Linux-based anyhow, and I'm glad that we contributed to the cause (see Firebox's contributions to networking code).
I also installed a Linux server over a year ago to handle internal web applications and for other odd applications, such as monitoring othe network devices and paging our cellphone in the case of a failure. Recently we also started using MySQL on the same server to provide address book functions to RightFAX users through MyODBC.
My suggestion is to slowly replace individual servers or applications, not simply to put Linux in there, but to save money on each project. for instance, by switching to Linux on the workstations, we saved $75 each on Client Access Licenses, which are only needed if you are using Windows to access the domain.
Someday we'll even switch to Linux/Samba for our domain controllers, probably instead of upgrading to XP.