Migrating from XP to W7 - Test lab...

[spoon_]

Very simple question, just gathering ideas for now - if you had £10k to spend on a test lab what would you buy?

Initially it should help out with migration from XP to W7 but it will be utilized as a fully fledged test lab later on.

So it will be:

a) Replica environment on a separate network,

b) Purposes:
- to test application compatibility,
- to test different migration strategies,
- to test deployment and performance of W7.

c) It should be built from ground up.


I have ideas of my own but want to cross check them with what you guys might come up with


Thanks,

Adrian

[Zak33]

I'd go back to Win 95.. them Win ME... and then EVERYTHING will look so easy, rosy and simple with Win7 migration, you'll thank me.....

[b0redom]

VMWare / HyperV all the way.

[scaryjim]

What's on the "real" network? I'd guess you'll want to mirror that as closely as possible...?

[Mblaster]

It depends on a few things really, the scale of the migration, the consistency of the current setup, and any special hardware needs.

Ideally every machine you're migrating is on the same hardware, so you can have one machine for testing hardware compatibility and performance, and application compatibility can be done in a virtual machine, but things are rarely that simple. The strategy for the migration will vary hugely ranging from 100 machines to 100,000.

Also, I would've thought that the lab being "utilized as a fully fledged test lab" later would have more of an influence on what setup you choose. You'd need to think about the scope of the testing that you want to do in the future in order to decide.

[aidanjt]

I'd just buy a decent workstation with buckets of RAM and a bunch of striped SSDs, and construct the desired environments in VMware Workstation or something. It wont iron out all driver related wrinkles, but unless your network environment is unnaturally uniform in hardware, driver related problems will be present anyway.

[MaddAussie]

Need some details on the existing setup tbh

[pardal51]

What's on the "real" network? I'd guess you'll want to mirror that as closely as possible...?

This is what we have at work, a mirror of our live network. This is probably the best way to simulate/test anything.
Couple of esxi hosts, shared storage (cheap sata) maybe???