The business reality of Win7 deployments

commentary Recent commentary in the press around Microsoft's Windows 7 and the upgrade paths available for Windows XP has failed to consider the realities of upgrading and managing both the operating system and application environments required by today's business users.

Instead, popular debate has focused on the lack of in-place upgrade options for Windows XP and some versions of Vista, and suggested this is a major barrier to deployment in a corporate environment.

But the reality for IT managers considering a Windows 7 roll-out is very different — even for those only considering the deployment issues of a new OS and not yet looking at the provision of a manageable and managed application platform for their users. This is especially true for large and medium-size organisations, and perhaps even for SMBs and other business users.

Few, if any are likely to undertake a 'big bang', all-machines-at-once Windows 7 upgrade.

Readers may have seen a variety of press on this topic in recent times. Many of the articles often refer to a Microsoft chart available from the Microsoft Windows 7 website, and also published by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), that maps which versions of Windows can be upgraded by which method.

The WSJ piece was a blog post by columnist Walt Mossburg relating to "personal" as opposed to "enterprise" technology. It highlights the concern that many users will need to undertake the onerous task of transferring files and applications to and from their PCs as part of the upgrade process, requiring external disk space and additional time and effort.

However, even where Microsoft provides in-place upgrades, it is still strongly recommended that users back up all user profile information and data, which will require the same provision of backup capability and storage space for both in-place and wipe-and-load migration paths. A number of articles make the assumption that for IT managers, this requires "massive data backup" — but this will be mitigated by the phased roll-out approach of most organisations.

Few, if any are likely to undertake a "big bang", all-machines-at-once Windows 7 upgrade. This means they will be able to re-use storage space progressively as the roll-out takes place. Companies such as Dimension Data are also able to provide dynamic storage, which mitigates the risks and costs for organisations without sufficient capacity in-house.

A second point not considered by any of these articles is that in-place upgrades have not been recognised as an industry best practice, or even as a viable option for businesses, for many years now. Why is that? Firstly, in-place procedures can be very slow — involving significant downtime for users, and still requiring a complete backup to enable roll-back or data recovery in the event of an upgrade failure.

Secondly — and more importantly — in-place upgrades prevent organisations from realising a multitude of benefits of "wipe and load" deployment procedures, including:

• A smaller footprint from a clean install, without the possibility of outdated and redundant drivers being left behind potentially causing instability
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• Compatibility testing of applications and drivers to ensure user functionality is maintained prior to upgrade, rather than simply hoping nothing fails during the in-place process
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• Ability to select the best install method for applications (depending on the application and the usage profile), rather than simply defaulting to the existing deployment method — which will be based on potentially outdated decisions from a previous installation project.
  These methods may not be suitable for today's always-on, always-connected, highly-mobile business environment. For example, thin-client or virtualisation options can be used to virtualise legacy or unstable applications that may not operate natively on Windows 7 — while protecting the rest of the user environment from any problems the applications may cause.
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• Elimination of unauthorised or unlicensed applications, or even applications and drivers no longer required, which may be left over from years of user installs and hardware changes. These components may otherwise be left in operation, using unnecessary processing power, or causing potential system instability and security holes, as well as increasing each machine's backup footprint.
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• Development of user data, profile backup and restore utilities that are not only used at OS migration time, but throughout the life cycle of hardware changes and emergency recovery procedures. These become part of the organisation's data security regime, allowing new, more relevant data storage policies to be implemented, rather than being tied to drive partitioning decisions that may have been made a decade ago.
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• Ability to deliver a tested, documented, manageable environment, which is essential to effective ongoing systems management

There are numerous other benefits to be gained by upgrading to Windows 7. But the bottom line is that in-place upgrades present added risk and pain to the business when compared with "wipe and load" processes. This is because every single client touched is potentially different from the one before.

To manage this risk and the associated cost of failure, it's essential to be working to a tested, documented and known outcome. The time taken to test and automate delivery of the operating systems and environment is not simply an essential part of deployment planning — it's also a critical success factor in achieving ongoing costs savings from deploying a fully-managed environment.

David Hanrahan is general manager of Microsoft Infrastructure Solutions at Dimension Data. Brian Walshe is national Microsoft practice manager.