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

Have you investigated remote display?

[Stinking Pig]

In the server room, you'll be able to replace at least 70% if not 100% of the Windows computers.

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,