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Should I spend my time on Vista?

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10 October 2006 - 1:49pm
Submitted by: rvanherk

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Vista
Typically if you work at a support organization you react on what happens at the customer. As soon as problems appears in a certain area, a support engineer will need to investigate what happens and see how the issue can be resolved.

OK, so do we just wait and see what will happen and respond as soon as something new comes up? No, of course we try to prepare ourselves and try to anticipate on what happens. Looking at the last few years, with the ZENworks suite we have seen new technology like the Middletier server, Patch Management, Asset Management and recently the endpoint security with SecureWave Sanctuary. In some cases we as support are able to prepare ourselves properly and get intensively trained on a product, sometimes it's more difficult to get up to speed and learn the new products we support.

So what's next? As we all know time doesn't stand still and technology evolves, it looks like that early next year Microsoft will be delivering Vista and at the same time Novell is working on the next generation ZENworks. I'm sure next year will be an interesting one for me and my colleagues within the ZENworks support teams at Novell Technical Support. If new products get released it's always the question how many impact will this have on the amount of support calls we will get, sometimes a new release causes a huge amount of questions and sometimes we see a very slow start and in these situations we do not see such a huge difference in the amount of support calls we get.

The big question.... I have heard people screaming to get beta software that will allow them to start testing Vista while others indicate they won't even start thinking about implementing Vista within the next year. What are your plan's with the release of Vista, would you like to implement it the day it gets released, or would you wait for a month, half a year, year, 2010, .......?

What's your plan? Initially install it on a test-workstation at the IT helpdesk, run some pilots with a small group or do you want to move your entire company as soon as possible?

Let me know.....




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andrew's picture

We roll over pcs every 3-4

Submitted by andrew (not verified) on 10 October 2006 - 4:16pm.

We roll over pcs every 3-4 years so until all pcs can run vista I am not going to touch it, so 2010 ish (I will run it on my own pc for the training aspect)

Andrew's picture

I would say sometime after

Submitted by Andrew (not verified) on 10 October 2006 - 11:24pm.

I would say sometime after 2007 - maybe 2008/09 but it depends on a few things .. one being - how well Novell will be supporting Vista .. Zenworks and the Client, that's it ( unless it will magically work without Client32 ). We have not heard a word about this so far ( what kind of support to expect from Novell, and when ), and we have a working machine with Vista RC set up for testing right now ( not that you can do much with it on our Novell network ).

Half of our machines can run it, the other half will be replaced by 2008 so that should not be a problem ..

Mark's picture

We have presure now to

Submitted by Mark (not verified) on 10 October 2006 - 11:28pm.

We have presure now to install it as "early adopters" so yes please we need to have Vista integration as soon as you can.

From a sysadmin point of view I'd rather not touch it till sp1 (which has always been our policy) but we are getting pressure from management that Vista is ready to go so we should install it now - or ast least the day it is released :-)
The MS marketing machine is doing a good job on this one.

Chris in the UK's picture

Hey Ron - we'd have to wait

Submitted by Chris in the UK (not verified) on 11 October 2006 - 12:39am.

Hey Ron - we'd have to wait for SP1 as a minimum first. That said, to move to Vista or SLED would be rip and replace anyway, we're currently examining our business drivers carefully to see what fits best.

Ron van Herk's picture

Well, I'm not into the

Submitted by Ron van Herk (not verified) on 11 October 2006 - 2:03am.

Well, I'm not into the position to make decisions on when we (Novell) will be delivering our Vista support.
I know the different teams are working to get their components updated to get the support for Vista running, for some teams this just means some minor updates for some others it's almost like writing a new product from scratch. In the last situation a last minute design change at Microsoft could have huge impact on our development cycle and as such it's a challenge for the people at Product Management and Engineering to determine when they should start working on building the support for such a new platform. Starting too late is not good, but starting too early might be a waste of time and money. I just assume Vista support will be there somewhere a few months after Vista ships, time enough for me to get myself ready to deliver the support for this.
As mentioned in the post I did, for me the big question is “how will this affect the workload we have?”, part of this will depend on the amount of customers that would like to live on the edge and start using this new platform as soon as possible, and part of this will depend on the quality of the product we deliver (so if it's up to me, let's have engineering spend some more time and have them deliver a quality product ;-)).
Indeed MS marketing has a reputation to keep up, fortunately the majority of my customers seem to prefer stability above living on the edge so I'll expect some intensive test-cycles at many of these customers. Test like this should take care of most compatibility issues that will come up within either our products, Vista or any other third party component.
What's your plan on testing Vista? Have you already started testing different third-party products running on Vista within your environment and what are your experiences with it?

Johnnie Odom's picture

My organization (the

Submitted by Johnnie Odom (not verified) on 11 October 2006 - 5:04am.

My organization (the Escambia County School District) has a staged 5-year buying cycle for PCs so we are always getting new PCs in. We won't be moving to Vista until either A) Zenworks supports it or B) We cannnot buy workstations from our vendor with XP installed. That said, it took Zen 3 a while to fully support XP in a stable state (I understand that Microsoft made some last-minute functionality changes that threw Zen development back a bit ...) and so we would wait until Zen's Vista support was fairly stable before deploying.

Domnic Mendes's picture

Here's a reason not to

Submitted by Domnic Mendes (not verified) on 11 October 2006 - 7:11am.

Here's a reason not to upgrade when Window's Vista comes out!

Microsoft's big piracy crackdown
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archi...

Ron van Herk's picture

Yep, it will be interesting

Submitted by Ron van Herk (not verified) on 11 October 2006 - 8:53am.

Yep, it will be interesting to see what this feature will do. I'm not sure if enterprise customers will have much problems with this as I assume they will get volume license key's that won't have much restrictions on this. Time will tell though...

Anthony's picture

I think the key thing is for

Submitted by Anthony (not verified) on 11 October 2006 - 11:29am.

I think the key thing is for Novell to be proactive about Vista rather than reactive as is normally the case. Regardless of when people claim to be planning (or not planning) implementations, the fact remains that Vista will ship at some point next year, and it would be nice to hear that Novell does support it on or shortly after release as opposed to saying "we're working on it".

Release Candidates are available now, and many Novell technical staff have MSDN subscriptions with access to early beta releases, so there is no reason why preliminary testing should not already be underway. By being proactive and testing code during the beta phase, Novell would improve its perception of lagging behind Microsoft by being able to more quickly deliver core components such as Client32 to customers who wish to use them, even if it is only for testing purposes.

Novell has the unfortunate habit of waiting until after Microsoft releases a product to start working on support for it. This causes lengthy delays in releasing code that many customers consider basic components of their networking environment, which in turn creates frustration for many of these customers.

Would I expect ZEN to support Vista on day 1? Of course not, but I also would not expect to wait several months before seeing even the slightest hint of progress from Novell on the subject as has often been the case in the past.

sysadmin1138's picture

Being a University, our

Submitted by sysadmin1138 (not verified) on 11 October 2006 - 11:47am.

Being a University, our environment is a little different than others. We have U-supplied desktops and a few laptops, but students and faculty often bring their own machines on campus and expect to access our NetWare-hosted resources. Some of them are brave enough to run the Novell Client on their personal machines. We already have people attempting to beta test Vista, but due to our insistance on using NCP for our sharing protocol and not CIFS they can't connect to the NetWare resources outside of NetStorage/WebDAV.

The biggest use of Zen we have is application deployment. We're not imaging, inventorying, or managing assets. But long years of training have managed to pound home to our staff that the Zen box is where you go for certain things.

Our brand new Vice-Provost of IT (effectively our CIO) is a self-proclaimed early adopter, and has already installed Vista on his home machine. How this will impact our IT direction remains to be seen. But we'll be having to deal with giving students with Vista laptops access to the NetWare hosted storage about two days after Dell/HP/Gateway start shipping Vista on hardware. We can stonewall for a while, but we will need to have SOMETHING in place to permit that within 12 months. Preferably within 6.

Eric Young's picture

As was the case with

Submitted by Eric Young (not verified) on 11 October 2006 - 2:11pm.

As was the case with NT/2000/XP, there is newer hardware that isn't going to work at all, or at its fullest potential, unless we upgrade to the next Windows :( A couple quick examples of this are lack of USB support in NT, and the crippled speed of Firewire 1394b in XP.

Like we did with XP, we'll probably deploy Vista to the "screamers" as soon as Novell officially supports all the major pieces (Novell Client, ZENworks agent, Groupwise Client, Groupwise Messenger Client). Knowing how long it took for ZEN4 to work stable on XP (2 years... TID 10088422, framed at my desk), we probably won't think about Vista mass-scale until about 2 years after release.

kevgo's picture

I also hail from a

Submitted by kevgo (not verified) on 11 October 2006 - 4:39pm.

I also hail from a University environment and currently image and maintain software deployment on more than 1100 systems. As mentioned by others we maintain a 4 year renewal cycle for lab machines, which implies a potential replacement of 275 systems in the coming year. (Spring 2007) We have been beta testing Vista on a few boxes and share the same concerns as others in terms of Novell client, ZFDAgent availibility and support for Vista. Preliminary investigation into Windows Vista indicates there will be no more volume license codes, and will require a server component to manage our imaged units (a bit more unwanted overhead);

"Starting with Vista, Microsoft will offer two different types of keys and offer three
different ways to distribute them within an organization. In all cases, some more work
will be required on the part of the technology department at a company.

"They will just need to do a little extra planning," Hartje said.

The first type of product key to replace the current system is called "multiple
activation key," or MAK. An IT pro at a company can install a key on a machine that
will then need to be validated online. Alternatively a proxy can be set up centrally to
activate multiple systems at once, according to Microsoft.

The second licensing option is called "key management service," or KMS. This requires
the organization to set up a KMS service on the corporate network that will activate
client machines. The Vista PCs will silently find the KMS service and activate,
according to Microsoft."

by Joris Evers
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6122462.html

We also image laptops (using a common base image as our desktops) with wireless capabilities, the next question is will there be 802.11x authentication supported in a Novell Client?

Time will tell..

Ian's picture

I'm in a K-12 environment.

Submitted by Ian (not verified) on 11 October 2006 - 6:39pm.

I'm in a K-12 environment. I do not see Vista as a viable option for a year or maybe even two after its release. I do not trust initial software releases from any vendor, Microsoft, Novell, whoever. However, I do need a rich novell client, a rich zen client and a full feature groupwise client. There's no way of getting around it in my environment. I need to have a student/teacher be able to log into the windows workstation and have the login script and NAL take care of everything in a seemless environment. I can't have people loading up various web based apps. They won't stand for it.

I really hope that Novell gets beta versions of their clients out the door as soon as possible. The sooner beta versions come out, the sooner people will report bugs, and the sooner a stable product will be available. These days, some Novell shops have a magnifying glass over their Novell products. It seems like whenever there is an issue with Novell it has a greater impact that with other software products. Whenever I have a Novell specific issue, such as a product just not working correctly, I tread lightly with reports of those issues due to the small amounts of pro microsoft support from certain people. A long delay in client software will shine light on Novell in a bad way. It would certainly for me.

So to actually answer the question, I'm guessing, assuming that there are stable clients available for at least the three pieces I mentioned above, Winter 2008 would be the initial tests. It might be rolled out in small numbers to people or teachers' labs who I know aren't technologically adverse. We would probably prefer to start to move the rest of the desktops to Vista the following year, depending on the hardware on hand and the true requirements needed for the hardware. A good amount of the push to upgrade will be based on Microsoft itself and how well it supports XP and how well Vista is rated in terms of security. We would prefer the more secure platform. Assuming Vista actually lives up to its billing in terms of security, that might prompt our upgrades to go at a quicker pace.

David Souders's picture

Might install it in a VM

Submitted by David Souders (not verified) on 12 October 2006 - 5:21am.

Might install it in a VM when it comes out just to see what the "improvements are". Definitely won't even begin testing / evaluation until SP1 and may not deploy until SP2. With several hundred applications to test and update that process can take a while.

Personally, I would rather go to a SLED environment . .. but being an educational institution, we must have those educational applications and most of them still require windows.

We have started purchasing our hardware with Vista in mind so that when we do roll it out we will have the hardware to support it.

Jeff Smith's picture

The environemnt I manage at

Submitted by Jeff Smith (not verified) on 12 October 2006 - 8:40am.

The environemnt I manage at the University of New Brunswick sounds very similar to yours. What struck me was your final question regarding 802.11x support in the Novell Client. We're feeling pressure from our Networking & Communcations Team becuase they are beginning to deploy this technology, and of course require support from our Desktop team (which we will), but we are struggling how to integrat this as painless as possible for students.

I'd be interested if you (or others) have any suggestions/feedback in this area!

Cheers,
Jeff Smith (http://www.unb.ca) or (http://labdisplay.unb.ca)

Boneless's picture

We are a small gov

Submitted by Boneless (not verified) on 16 October 2006 - 2:28pm.

We are a small gov administration about 450 users with just 2 admins and 2 support guys, admins also doing some support.

Our network is finely tuned now but preparing the deployment of a new workstation definition including new OS is a work of many months though deployment itself is quite fast thanks to Zenworks.

So when Vista comes out we will wait for client and zenworks agent for windows vista to be avalaible and quite stable. If there is something missing we may wait until Zenworks 8 for full Vista support. This point us on early 2008 to start Vista deployment.

Lachy Darby's picture

Due to external business

Submitted by Lachy Darby (not verified) on 26 October 2006 - 12:18pm.

Due to external business drivers , my business will be forced to run Vista not long after it release , I would fully agree with most comments in here regarding the desir not to touch Vista til at least SP1.

Having looked at the product in beta I am struggling to see any benefits for my business in Vista.

I do however look forward to Zenworks be able to support Vista sooner rather than later.

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