10.1 Introduction

Migrating to Windows 2000 involves a number of preparation steps and a thorough understanding of the various migration techniques and their implications.

Before the actual migration is even attempted, a full design of the future Windows 2000 infrastructure must be achieved. In other words, the design phase in the Windows 2000 project will define what the future infrastructure will look like. The migration phase will define the steps involved in getting there.

The migration phase must provide a strategy for migrating the current infrastructure to Windows 2000 without interrupting daily business. This is a very challenging aspect of the migration. Global corporations may have a large existing infrastructure composed of many Windows NT 4.0 domains. Compaq, for example, had 13 account domains and more than 1,700 resource domains. It is often the case that corporations or conglomerates don t really know how many domains exist in their infrastructure. One of the design goals is to reduce the number of domains and store the resources they contain in organizational units. These containers may replace resource domains, since Windows 2000 provides the ability to delegate administrative rights at the level of organizational units. Collapsing domains into organizational units is not something that can be achieved overnight. The migration phase of a 100,000-seat company may take several months. It is not possible to stop all operations while the migration phase is in progress. Therefore, the migration of these domains requires accepting a coexistence phase, where some of the accounts or resources have...