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,

Don't do it.

[jmaslak]

I love Linux. I use it almost exclusively at home.

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.