Windows-to-Linux. Large Installations Handling the Changeover?

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)

If the college does move to Linux, there are a reasonable number of experienced Linux admins as student in the college, running a debian cluster for the compsoc, and could provide a pool of about 10 admins that know the network and the people involved in the running of the college, and could ease the changeover. If anyone has been in a similar situation, what were the pitfalls involved, and the main difficulties in rolling it out? The college *needs* (so I have been told) to have an external contract to solve problems with a defined level of service."

Comments

My little exerience..

[FLaMeBoY]

Well from my little experience.. don't look to replace windows everywhere. You will need to keep some windows server's running for specialist things, as well as several servers it may not be a cost saving at all because of the extra time/effort required. My current thinking is that linux can replace 70% or so of all NT servers out there at least, and there are considerable savings possible from this.
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..

[FLaMeBoY]

That 30% or less is all those wonderful things you happen to run into like legacy accounting software which has a server that will only run on a specific version of a specific os, and there isn't a snowball's chance of getting the data converted and finding a replacement in the one shot without major disruption. There is also a lot of stuff which works on linux, but has a reduced feature set or has bugs (openldap seems to be one of these things). I'm not saying a total conversion can't be achieved, just that you have to weigh up whether it's worth the effort for some things.

IBM

[mlinksva]

Call up IBM, RedHat and local shops (quick search turned up Eolach and Bayridge). They all should have experience fighting for Microsoft-held accounts and bringing Linux into that environment, and can fulfill the external contract requirement.

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.