It’s Windows 10 launch week! I couldn’t go to the festivities at the Microsoft Store in Bellevue, WA on Wednesday. I work out of our Illinois office. Some of my coworkers in Bellevue did though, and they sent this picture. Looks like fun! In celebration of the release of Windows 10, I’m giving you a list of five ways Adaptiva OneSite helps you Migrate to this much-anticipated OS.
If you’re a small business where everybody in the company can see each other by standing up and looking around the room, OneSite is probably not the best tool for you to handle your Windows 10 upgrades. However, if you are running Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) in multiple locations with thousands of computers to migrate to Windows 10, you should know about OneSite. It can make your Windows 10 deployment a whole lot faster, way simpler, and a heck of a lot less expensive. Here are five ways:
Total Bandwidth Control
SCCM administrators have to ask questions like, “How in the world am I going to deliver a gigantic Windows 10 image from North America to rural China over some slow and unpredictable WAN links?”
One of our Fortune 500 customers used to ship DVD sets with OS images from North America to rural China, until they tried OneSite. They were stunned when OneSite delivered an 18GB image reliably and without impacting the WAN! Now they send OS images anywhere in the world they want without shipping physical DVDs, Blue-ray disks, USB drives, etc. They just drop them on the network any of time of the day.
Unlike TCP-based, reactive bandwidth management solutions, UDP-based OneSite ensures that SCCM never impacts other traffic on the WAN—not even for a millisecond. OneSite’s predictive bandwidth harvesting is one of seven proprietary bandwidth management technologies that only Adaptiva offers. If you plan to deploy Windows 10 to remote offices using SCCM, OneSite solves your WAN bandwidth problem. Send files as big as you want, whenever you want, worry free. No throttling, no scheduling, and no congestion.
Peer-to-peer PXE
PXE is awesome! Right? Okay, maybe you don’t get all that excited about it anymore, but you’d miss it if is was gone. You wouldn’t miss the configuration headaches it brings though! SCCM admins need a PXE sever at nearly every office where they plan to deploy Windows 10. That’s a lot of servers. But wait, that’s not all you need! You need a PXE server on every network segment in each office, unless you set up IP helpers and DHCP scope options. As we all know, that kind of massive change to network configuration can be a showstopper, or at least a show slower-downer.
With Adaptiva’s Peer-to-peer PXE (P2P PXE), you don’t need any of that to do bare metal installs of Windows 10. You don’t even need PXE servers. You just check a box and PXE is available worldwide, instantly.
Virtual State Migration Points
When a user is migrated from an older version of Windows to Windows 10, they need all their data and all their settings (aka “state”) migrated to the new system. If they run Windows 10 and can’t find their cat wallpaper and their Hawaiian vacation photos, they’ll freak out! Okay, it’s not really about cats and vacation photos, it’s all about business data, settings, etc. Business-critical settings and data that absolutely must be done right so your company doesn’t skip a single beat.
You’re not just protecting a user’s data and settings, you’re protecting your company’s revenue. You can’t take risks. With Adaptiva OneSite, you don’t have to. Our V-SMP technology integrates directly into task sequences and has been proven time and again in real-world Windows OS migrations by Fortune 500 companies.
High Availability, Load-balancing Storage
OneSite’s P2P storage is managed through an intelligent virtual SAN that is redundant and load balancing. The virtual SAN is self-forming and self-managing, so there’s nothing for administrators to do.
We combine this powerful storage with an advanced use of the PXE protocol. If 10 computers request new Windows 10 OS images all at once, they can each get it from a different source system. This way, migrations happen fast, and no single peer is burdened by serving several other peers at once.
Multiple copies of state can be made as well, so you don’t have to worry about a system going down and interrupting your Windows 10 migration.
AutoSync
Suppose you are performing Windows 10 migrations at 400 operating locations around the world, or even 100. Once you have delivered OSD files there, you’ll need to update them. A new version of an application may be required for compliance, a mandatory security patch must be included, drivers might need to be updated, etc. When that happens, you don’t want to resend huge OS image files over the WAN. Plus, you don’t have time to orchestrate and oversee the updating of OSD content in all those locations.
AutoSync is one more way OneSite makes large-scale Windows 10 migrations simpler. When you update any OSD content in SCCM, OneSite will automatically detect the change, create a small binary diff file of the changes, deliver it to all the operating locations that need it, and apply it. While most software uses a generic binary diff capability, Adaptiva engineered a state-of-the-art differential compression algorithm that is significantly more effective!
With OneSite AutoSync, your Windows 10 OSD content is automatically, efficiently kept in sync worldwide.
