Salvatore Salamone
Upgrading from NetWare 3.x to 4.1 is a time-consuming, labor-intensive task. New management tools that help speed the migration have arrived.
Network administration consumes the largest portion of a LAN staff's time (
see graph
). Over a three- to five-year period, administration costs can be five times more expensive than the purchase price of all networking hardware and software, says Forrester Research (Cambridge, MA).
Novell's NetWare Directory Service (NDS) helps reduce administration costs in a number of ways. NDS's single log-on to multiple servers and virtualization of network resources eliminate the need for users (or applications) to know the exact physical location of these resources. Instead of specifying a server name, volume name, and directory path, a L
AN administrator using NDS assigns a unique alias to a directory for users and applications to use. This saves costs when a network resource, such as a printer or an application, gets relocated. Additionally, when using NDS, administrators can more easily handle frequently occurring, time-consuming tasks, such as adding new users and changing existing users' access rights.
To help people upgrade to NDS more easily, several companies have released migration utilities. Some of the more interesting tools include MIGRATE.EXE from Novell (Provo, UT; 801 429-7000), Double-Take from Network Specialists Inc. (Lyndhurst, NJ; 201 804-8400), DS Standard from Preferred Systems (West Haven, CT; 203 937-3000), and the REXXWare Migration Toolkit from SimWare (Ottawa, Canada; 613 727-1779). Each tool performs a different type of function, and some complement one another when used at the same time.
Novell's MIGRATE.EXE, a utility bundled with NetWare 4.1, lets you map all bindery objects on NetWare 2.x, 3.x, and
4.x servers into a single NDS container. The program also migrates system log-in scripts to help make the transition from 3.x to 4.x easier.
Preferred Systems' DS Standard is a Windows-based tool that helps an organization plan and administer NDS. Such tools let companies, when they move to an enterprise-wide directory service, also reexamine their corporate networking structure. This reexamination is necessary because many LANs have been thrown together haphazardly. NDS allows organizations to design a corporate LAN hierarchy that more closely matches the company's business units and their functions. DS Standard helps in this type of planning by discovering NetWare 2.x and 3.x bindery-based servers, as well as NetWare 4.x servers, and letting you merge separately created directory trees into one directory structure.
Another migration tool, which can be used as a stand-alone utility or in conjunction with DS Standard, is NSI's Double-Take. The Double-Take data-replication tool (designed for data b
ackup) has many uses in server migration. With Double-Take, a LAN manager can migrate user and file information from NetWare 3.x servers to 4.1 servers. A manager can also use Double-Take to keep existing 3.x servers operational while moving to 4.x. In this scenario, any changes, such as adding a user to a 3.x server or modifying access rights, will be replicated to the 4.x server in real time.
SimWare's REXXWare Migration Toolkit automates many of the repetitive steps required during migration. The tool is based on REXXWare, an automation scripting tool for the NetWare environment. One of this toolkit's strengths is that it automates tasks in an intelligent way. For example, in many organizations, a user may have separate accounts on a handful of NetWare 3.x servers. Ideally, when all 3.x servers have been upgraded to 4.1, you'd want the user to have a single account. With the REXXWare Migration Toolkit, duplicate files and objects are flagged when they're being migrated so that a LAN manager can iden
tify redundancies and decide how to handle each situation as it arises.
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The bulk of the annual network-support cost per user are recurring LAN-administration costs, says Forrester Research (Cambridge, MA). NetWare Directory Service simplifies NetWare management, and NDS migration tools can make the transition to Netware 4.1 easier.
End Migration Headaches
