5.8 Migration

If your deployment involves a migration from an existing ZENworks infrastructure, you should have gone through a pre-staging process, but your actual process for deploying to the end user communities should not be different. You still need to pilot and deploy in the same way as if this is a new deployment of ZENworks Configuration Management.

You should use the ZENworks Migration Wizard to perform the pre-staging activities, which includes migration of the following resources:

The Migration Wizard can be found at the following locations:

%zenworks_home%\install\downloads\tools
https://servername/zenworks-setup/

It is important to note that if you are migrating from an eDirectory infrastructure (for user sources) to an Active Directory environment, you should take advantage of the migration capabilities built into the Migration Wizard for migrating associations. This allows you to migrate your existing eDirectory associations to Active Directory users, groups, and folders.

In addition, if you are migrating workstation objects, the wizard allows you to avoid the need for discovery of devices. After you have migrated your workstation objects into the ZENworks Configuration Management Zone, you can target them directly from there. In fact, we recommend that all existing ZENworks customers migrate their workstation objects even if they are associating applications and policies only to users in the user source. If workstations are not migrated, and you deploy the ZENworks Adaptive Agent to the existing ZENworks workstations, all applications and policies within ZENworks Configuration Management redeploy.

Some additional best practice recommendations for using the ZENworks Desktop Management Migration Wizard include:

In addition to the ZENworks 7 Migration Wizard, ZENworks 11 Configuration Management also includes a migration tool that can be used to migrate data from an existing ZENworks Linux Management infrastructure. The tool can also be downloaded from the same setup page as the migration tool for ZENworks 7.

The ZENworks Linux Management migration utility helps ZLM customers migrate their ZENworks Linux Management zone to an existing ZENworks 11 zone. This involves migration of bundles, policies, devices and associations for devices to bundles and policies. As there is no concept of Catalogs in ZENworks 11, we you be migrating ZENworks Linux Management Catalogs as either Linux Bundles or Linux Dependency Bundles in ZENworks 11. In addition, you will be migrating ZENworks Linux Management policies (Remote Execute/Text File) as ZENworks 11 bundles with install actions as run script/edit text file actions.

It is important to note that you should always test your migration(s) in a lab environment first, before you begin your production migrations. You should also test everything that you want to migrate as well, it doesn't hurt and it can save you a lot of time when it comes time to touch the production environment. When it is time to perform your production migration, we suggest doing things in phases, and take it one manageable step at a time.

The ZENworks Linux Management object migration wizard migrates RPM/File/Image Bundles, Remote Execute Policy and Text File Policy, Settings, Devices and Assignments.

In short, the user experience with the migration tools that Novell provides are very similar, and accomplish what is required to get existing content and settings from one infrastructure to your new ZENworks 11 infrastructure.