W2K Mass upgrade from 4.0

[hotch]

I have a network that has a lot of outlying lans running
4.0 boxes. They all need to run W2K by the end of the year
because 4.0 is phasing out of MS's support. Being a
government entity of sorts, we have to follow policy-
procedures and remain in a support level for the OS's.

So, migrating an NT 4.0 network into a fully working and
running W2K network in a few months with Exchange and all
user profiles and logins is going to be a difficult task.
Especially since they've not done any REAL planning yet.

I'm looking for suggestions and ideas on how I should go
about reccomending the upgrades to happen.

They're thinking of running parallel networks. Having W2K
servers along side the NT 4.0 servers and configuring the
Active Directory Services first. This sounds like the best
plan of attack but as most in IT know, budgets don't
always follow IT minds.

If there are any ideas out there, please share.

Questions please post.

 

[Alex L]

I haven't done any migration before because our company's network is still
using NT 4.0. Once advice would be planned ahead and do plenty of research.
It is alright to run a hybrid network with Windows 2000 and Windows NT in a
mixed mode. But once you activate AD, I believe your NT Servers can only
take on the BDC, and it cannot take the role of PDC, as the server with AD
will resume that role.

I would definitely try to deploy this in a test environment before setting
it into production.

 

[Gerry Hickman]

Hi,

When I looked at my own similar situation a few months back, the whole
task seemed too big to contemplate, so what I did was break it down into
sections.

1. Forget the servers and clean build all the clients (roaming profiles)
2. Forget the clients and update the servers to mixed mode
3. Switch to native mode when all servers are on Win2k

I found this much easier to cope with.