Windows 7 Migrations Simplified

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Migration or Migraine? ... 2

Planning Based On a Very Limited Upgrade Path ... 2

Redeveloping the SOE ... 2

Preparing Hardware ... 3

Dealing With User Downtime and Loss of Productivity ... 3

Resolving Compatibility Issues ... 4

Windows 7 Migration – The NxTop Way ... 5

A Paced Migration Path ... 6

A Single SOE! ... 6

Extending Hardware Refresh ... 7

Productivity Guaranteed ... 7

Supporting Legacy Applications & Hardware: Best of Both Worlds ... 8

That’s Migration… Not Migraine ... 8

Appendix: What is a Bare-Metal Client Hypervisor? ... 9

Appendix: Microsoft OS Facts ... 9

About Virtual Computer ... 10

Windows 7 Migrations

Simplified

By Colin Lim & Andrew Bycroft March 2010

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2 NxTop – Windows 7 Migrations Simplified | Virtual Computer Inc.

Migration or Migraine?

There is no time for rest in the fast paced world of Information Technology with very little tolerance for those who do not keep up to date. With Microsoft announcing that it will cease support of Windows XP and Windows Vista in the not too distant future, organisations are left with the headaches and challenges of how to go about migrating their entire PC fleet to Windows 7. Time is limited yet it appears there is much to be done before Windows 7 can successfully be deployed in most organisations. The following are the most pressing obstacles that you will need to overcome:

• Planning based on a very limited upgrade path

• Redeveloping the SOE

• Preparing hardware

• Dealing with user downtime and loss of productivity

• Resolving compatibility issues

Before we discuss each of these in more detail, let’s address the possibility that your organisation has decided to indefinitely postpone the migration to Windows 7 and continue with a soon to be unsupported OS. Here are some ramifications of this to consider:

• No support from Microsoft means no OS updates, which means vulnerabilities will not be addressed – a huge security risk!;

• New peripherals will only have Windows 7 drivers available and will not be supported under older operating systems;

• Many application vendors will also stop supporting their applications under older operating systems.

For most organisations these issues would present a large enough motivating factor to start to plan the migration to Windows 7.

Planning Based On a Very Limited Upgrade Path

The change from your existing OS to Windows 7 will be, in most cases, a migration to a new OS rather than an upgrade. This is because Microsoft does not allow you to upgrade to Windows 7 from any flavour of Windows XP. The only upgrade path that is possible is from Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or 2 to the corresponding versions in Windows 7.

This means that when considering implementing Windows 7 within your organisation you need to perform “clean installs.” That is, you will need to wipe existing operating systems from your users’ PCs and perform a new installation of Windows 7. Unless you are frequently backing up data on PCs performing a wipe leaves no margin for error.

Redeveloping the SOE

A SOE is a Standard Operating Environment which contains an operating system and applications in some cases that are common to multiple users within an organisation. The SOE is essentially at the heart of managing PCs. It dictates what must be installed on each PC and is basically a toolkit which enables business to take place and users to be productive, yet it is constantly challenged by users who want to add their own personal software and by users who want to play with applications and

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files and inadvertently break things. Not only do these challenges cause you headaches and unproductive resource allocation, but every time an OS migration is performed you need to start from scratch developing a new SOE.

Creating a new SOE starts off quite simply by finding a suitable test PC, installing Windows 7, installing the latest service pack, configuring the OS regional settings and time zone, configuring network settings, joining the PC to the domain, adding and updating hardware drivers, configuring printers and any other peripherals, adding applications, adding application patches, configuring applications, locking down the OS so that mischievous users can’t destroy the fruits of your labour (your SOE masterpiece) and then testing the SOE for stability.

If you are fortunate enough to have a good SOE imaging and application delivery solution in place, you may be able to get by with one SOE image which can be deployed to different brands and models of PCs and upon completion will automatically create a new hostname, join the Active Directory domain, inject all of the appropriate drivers for the specific hardware and install all of the applications required by the user of that PC. If you are not fortunate enough to be in those shoes, then you are looking at multiple SOE images – perhaps one per department, or a single SOE image followed by a great deal of manual work to install applications. If you haven’t started thinking about your new SOE for Windows 7, then the unfortunate news is that you have a long and arduous journey ahead of you!

Preparing Hardware

It was Moore who stated that processors would double in performance every eighteen months and with that statement, software vendors felt compelled to push the boundaries of their software to drain every last available resource out of your hardware. Not surprisingly, Windows 7 has much greater processing, memory and disk storage requirements than Windows XP and only marginally greater disk storage requirements than Windows Vista. The question becomes – do you upgrade the existing PCs that are not up to the challenge or take advantage of the recent landslide reduction in cost of new PCs and replace the old with new? With the latter chances are you will be introducing yet another model of PC to your fleet which may mean creating yet another SOE image. Selecting, testing and acquiring upgrades for existing PCs or new PCs is only going to eat away at the little time you have to move over to Windows 7, not that we are trying to make you panic.

Dealing With User Downtime and Loss of Productivity

User downtime is unavoidable when it comes to an OS upgrade, so minimising the downtime is going to be the best outcome you can hope for. After all, user downtime means lost productivity which ultimately means lost profitability. With each PC needing to be wiped and freshly installed with Windows 7, even with imaging software, this means that there will be at least 15 minutes per user of downtime. Doesn’t sound too bad? Consider the case of an organisation with 100 users which equates to 375 hours of lost productivity which is a little over 15 days (or 3 working weeks). For an OS upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 the lost productivity doesn’t necessarily stop there though. As Windows 7 is radically different to Windows XP, training will need to be delivered. As users take time out of their daily rituals to attend training you are adding to the number of hours of lost productivity. Beyond this still, users are not going to adapt instantly to Windows 7 – it is going to take some getting used to, meaning that users may be less productive initially until memories of Windows XP fade.

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How much does your organisation stand to lose through so much downtime caused by an OS upgrade?

Resolving Compatibility Issues

No matter how careful plans are, there are likely to be some applications which simply will not run under Windows 7. Not to worry; Microsoft has made allowances and created Windows XP Mode (XPM). XPM in Windows 7 runs Windows XP within a virtual instance. Simply put, XP mode is a virtual machine image file that contains a fully licensed and activated copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 3 installed.

Microsoft says this will allow organisations to run applications that are not ready for Windows 7 within XPM and therefore not be impacted by lack of support for applications. XPM does pose limitations for some users, however. These issues include:

• Significant Impact on Memory & PC Resources: Running Windows 7 & Windows XP in essentially the same window places a huge toll on memory. Running XPM will essentially slow down the PC and if you are running this on older machines, then the performance impact can be significant;

• Sluggish Application Performance: Windows 7 relies on an RDP engine to operate XPM. This impacts performance within XPM making applications sluggish. Tests have shown that applications running in XPM can run up to 30% slower than in native mode.

• Security Vulnerabilities: XPM runs in “Privileged Mode” on Windows 7 in order to utilise hardware virtualization. The implications of this are that it creates a security hole within Windows 7. Add to this the fact that most users will not remember to keep updating Windows XP with new security patches then the security vulnerabilities of utilising XPM increases significantly;

• Confusing User Interfaces: Because XPM runs within a VM within Windows 7, a number of glitches & annoyances are produced that will confuse most users. For example, any security or other error messages that are produced from Windows XP running in XPM will actually appear as error messages in the Windows 7 taskbar. For the average user, this will be confusing as they click through on the urgent error message & are presented with incorrect security centre dialog. In addition to this, you are not able to see what applications are running inside XPM within Windows 7. All applications appear inside a Virtual PC icon within the Windows 7 UI.

“Simply put, XP mode is a bit of a kludge, a half-baked, half-measure of a solution

cobbled together from various disjointed Microsoft technologies... Overall, the XP

mode end-user experience is uneven, with plenty of opportunities for novices to get confused as they navigate between physical and virtual applications and resources. Add to this the support requirements of maintaining two completely disparate OS

images per system, and XP mode may be more trouble than it's worth” 1

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Back to the drawing board; it seems. How do you plan to support legacy applications that fail to run under Windows 7 that may need to provide multimedia to users without affecting security, performance or the user experience? Well you could give every user who needs to run a legacy application a second computer with Windows XP installed, but obviously this would be ridiculous! Contrary to the bleak picture painted above, migration to Windows 7 doesn’t have to be painful. Enter NxTop - a secure, high performance, user friendly and cost effective solution to this problem and, moreover, a solution to ease the angst associated with OS migrations both now and into the future.

Windows 7 Migration – The NxTop Way

Virtual Computer’s NxTop is a revolutionary new solution in PC lifecycle management that uses desktop virtualization to make deployment, management and security of PCs simple. NxTop makes managing thousands of computers as easy as it is to manage one!

NxTop utilises a unique bare metal client hypervisor called NxTop Engine that is installed directly on any hardware platform. A hypervisor is a cut down purpose built operating system that provides controlled access to hardware and allows other popular generic operating systems such as Windows and Linux to run on top of it. Unlike other desktop virtualization products, the operating systems and applications are installed and are executed on the PC itself rather than hosted on a central server. NxTop Engine and all operating systems, applications and user data that reside on PCs are centrally managed by our management console: NxTop Centre. NxTop Centre delivers the ability to provide granular per user or user group policies to control what hardware peripherals may be used, how data is backed up, at what times a user may use an OS and applications and even whether the disk should be wiped if a PC is lost or stolen.

So let’s take a look at each of the problems that you face with a Windows 7 migration and how NxTop eases or removes the burden:

• Planning based on a very limited migration path

• Redeveloping the SOE

• Preparing hardware

• Dealing with user downtime and loss of productivity

• Resolving compatibility issues

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6 NxTop – Windows 7 Migrations Simplified | Virtual Computer Inc. [Diagram: NxTop Engine Architecture]

A Paced Migration Path

The challenge with having a limited upgrade path is the fact that it is more likely that instead of attempting a multi stage upgrade, you will in fact start fresh and wipe the disk then install Windows 7. The problem comes about in the time it takes to wipe the disk and install the new operating system and get users familiar with Windows 7 and using it productively. Rushing a migration has become the norm and it is this rushing that typically leads to problems. If a migration could be performed at a much steadier pace it would be easier on both IT staff and users. Not all users adapt to a new product quickly. For some it may be weeks before productivity levels are restored.

With NxTop the client hypervisor is capable of running multiple operating systems simultaneously. What this means is that the current OS (Windows XP or Windows Vista) and Windows 7 can coexist on the same PC and be executed simultaneously (in contrast to standard dual boot capabilities). The user can continue to use their current OS until they have received training. Once training has been completed they can start using Windows 7, perhaps for a few hours a day initially, and gradually increasing their time spent in Windows 7 every few days.

A Single SOE!

Redeveloping an SOE is usually standard practice for an OS migration and is even more time consuming when there is no simple, cost effective, unified way to consolidate the number of SOE images required. This is a result of the requirement for different hardware drivers and different applications for different departments.

NxTop separates the four main components of the SOE into different components (hardware, OS, applications and user data) with each managed independently. The hypervisor provides the ability to decouple the hardware from the operating system. The result is true hardware independence – an operating system that is “hardware-agnostic”. This means organisations can build a single SOE regardless of the brand and model or type (desktop or laptop) of PC. It is then recommended that applications be virtualised and assigned to users or user groups then injected into an OS image depending on Active Directory settings. The result is that a single SOE image can be maintained yet each user can get access to the required applications.

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In the future should a new OS be deployed a single image would be created and with a few mouse clicks applications again would be assigned to users allowing an OS migration to take place in minutes instead or hours or days. Looking beyond the migration, NxTop helps maintain SOE’s by a self cleaning process that is initiated on reboot of an OS. Any unauthorised additions or deletions by a user will be restored automatically.

Extending Hardware Refresh

As a new OS and applications become available it is inevitable that technology may need to be upgraded or refreshed - NxTop can help in two ways.

Firstly, the hardware independence makes it easy to deploy a new OS and applications with a single SOE regardless of the brand and model of the PC. Secondly, one of the main reasons PC’s get upgraded or refreshed so quickly is that after a period of time they tend to slow down significantly with additional applications and lots of user data. The term for this phenomenon is “PC bloat” and is removed with NxTop’s self-cleaning image feature which delivers the capability of presenting a fresh, clean operating system on a daily basis. This feature alone could very well extend the life of a PC by a year or two.

Productivity Guaranteed

Productivity is the biggest casualty in an OS migration and it is not just the lost time during the migration – it is the follow on from the training and the settling in period that also impact productivity and ultimately profitability to any organisation taking on the OS migration challenge. Utilising NxTop a new OS image (Windows 7) can be pushed out to users in the background whilst they are working on their current OS (Windows XP or Vista) and applications. Once the Windows 7 is installed the user will have the ability to boot into Windows XP or Vista, Windows 7 or both simultaneously. Although training is likely to take up some time Windows XP/Vista and Windows 7 will both be available allowing the user to slowly become accustomed to the changes rather than the more abrupt change usually associated with an OS migration.

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8 NxTop – Windows 7 Migratio

[Diagram: Screenshot of NxTop Engine 2.0 with Windows 7 & Windows XP installed]

Supporting Legacy Applications & Hardware:

Although Windows 7 touts many benefits

applications. Microsoft’s attempt to fix this by creating XP M

XP inside a virtual instance detracts from the overall user experience, reduces performance and opens up a host of security holes. Although NxTop itself uses

performance, secure rich user experience for Windows XP whilst running another OS such as Windows 7. Both coexist with the user able to toggle between the two easily

function within Windows). The end result and hardware within Windows XP until compa Windows XP would be removed leaving on

That’s Migration… Not Migraine

There is no need to consult your pharmacist for headache pain killers when perf

OS migration! Instead consider a healthy dose of NxTop which allows a single SOE regardless of how many different brands and models of PC or how many different departments with different applications you may have; allows a steady paced migration benefiting you and users through the current OS and Windows 7 residing on a single PC and running simultaneously with dep

happening seamlessly in the background whilst users go about their daily ritual.

Windows 7 Migrations Simplified | Virtual Computer Inc. NxTop Engine 2.0 with Windows 7 & Windows XP installed]

Supporting Legacy Applications & Hardware: Best of Both Worlds

Although Windows 7 touts many benefits, it may not be completely compatible with some legacy mpt to fix this by creating XP Mode (XPM) simply by running Windows XP inside a virtual instance detracts from the overall user experience, reduces performance and

p a host of security holes. Although NxTop itself uses virtualization

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Appendix: What is a Bare-Metal Client Hypervisor?

Hardware virtualization engines come in two types, called “Type 1” and “Type 2.”

A “Type 1” hypervisor is the name given to hypervisors that run natively on a piece of hardware. In other words, the hypervisor is the operating system. This is how all the major server hypervisors (VMware ESX, Xen, Hyper-V) work nowadays. Type 1 hypervisors are typically called “bare metal” hypervisors since they install and run on the “bare metal” of the computer.

A “Type 2” virtualization engine is actually more like an application that you install and run on top of an existing operating system, like Windows. VMware Workstation and the free VMware Server are probably the most widely known Type 2 virtualization environments, followed closely by Microsoft Virtual PC or VMware Fusion for the Mac. There’s also an open source project from Sun called VirtualBox that’s gaining popularity.

Type 2 virtualization engines that run on laptops and desktops have been around for a long time. While they’re good for certain scenarios (including lab testing and offline VDI), Type 2 environments don’t really help the PC LCM problem since they run on top of another OS (which you still have to manage.) So a Type 2 virtualization engine on the client doesn’t “save” you anything; in fact, it probably creates more work for you in that it’s essentially just one more application to manage on top of everything else.

Contrast that to a Type 1 bare-metal hypervisor on the client, which acts as the lowest level operating system. Since it’s not running on top of another OS, Type 1 client hyper-visors can be very efficient and don’t require an underlying OS which itself must be patched, secured, etc 2.

Appendix: Microsoft OS Facts

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Windows XP Professional Windows Vista Ultimate (32 bit) Windows 7 Ultimate (32 bit) Minimum CPU 233MHz 1GHz 1GHz Minimum RAM 64MB 1GB 1GB

Minimum Disk Space 1.5GB 15GB 16GB

End of Support Date July 13, 2010 April 13, 2010 -

2_“_{How bare-metal client hypervisors will mean the end of agent-based Windows management}_{” whitepaper by Brian}

Madden

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About Virtual Computer

Virtual Computer, Inc. is redefining PC lifecycle management by making it as easy to manage a thousand PCs as it is to manage one. NxTop, the company’s flagship PC management product, combines a bare-metal client virtualization platform with a powerful central management system to dramatically reduce PC management costs, while improving reliability, security, and the end-user experience.

NxTop uses advanced virtualization technology to isolate the main components of a PC: the hardware, operating system, applications, and user data, allowing each to be managed independently. Founded in 2007, Virtual Computer is privately held and headquartered in Westford, MA. For more information visit www.virtualcomputer.com.