Is the thought of migrating your NT network to AD giving you sleepless nights? This tool can help you rest easier.
Aspirin for Your Active Directory Headaches
Is the thought of migrating your NT network to AD giving you sleepless nights? This tool can help you rest easier.
Evidence suggests that many administrators who have upgraded
to Windows 2000 have yet to implement Active Directory
for fear of its effect on their systems. So, how do you
overcome this hesitancy? BindView thinks it has an answer
with bv-Admin for Windows 2000 Migration 3.7.
Bv-Admin is actually Entevo’s DirectMigrate
2000 product; BindView purchased it and incorporated it
into its bv-Admin suite of products. Bv-Admin Migration
ships as part of bv-Admin, but comes on a separate CD.
It costs an additional $9.95 per user, on top of the $11.95
per user for bv-Admin.
Bv-Admin for Win2K uses a GUI interface
similar to the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), so
its layout and functionality will be familiar to Windows
administrators. Bv-Admin supports all migration scenarios,
including domain consolidations, in-place upgrades and
parallel migrations. It uses the project concept to manage
migrations, making it desirable for large enterprise migrations.
A project’s created within the tool; information related
to the migration is created, gathered, tracked and reported
on based on its project name. This makes managing multiple
migrations possible.
Bv-Admin includes several built-in reports,
which are useful for verifying successful migrations and
troubleshooting problem ones. In addition to reporting,
bv-Admin allows you to ferret out any potential problems
by doing a test run of your migration before going live
with it. However, should new problems crop up after the
live migration, it also includes a rollback option.
Creating a migration project is done through
a wizard, executed from within the project section of
the GUI. Although the creation process is wizard-based,
you’ll still need to know a little about how AD works
for the process to be successful. Concepts like OUs and
Containers are used throughout the migration process,
and a poorly constructed AD will cause more problems than
it solves (of course, this principle applies to all networks).
The migration project includes options like naming rules,
collision rules and logging options. Projects can be saved
as templates for immediate use or modified for future
migrations.
 |
| The migration project wizard spells
out clearly what needs to go where. |
Bv-Admin for Windows 2000 Migration helps you with the
Herculean task of moving from your NT directory structure
to AD. I found it to be comprehensive and powerful. It
does have a learning curve, and you’ll definitely have
to brush up on your AD first if you’re to use this successfully,
as the AD structure will need to be laid out ahead of
time. Having tackled migrations from Windows NT to Win2K
AD, I believe the time and frustration a tool such as
bv-Admin can save you will make the product worth every
penny.
About the Author
Stewart Cawthray, MCSE, ITIL Service Manager, is an IT management consultant for Hewlett-Packard.