ProfileUnity Does the Heavy Lifting on Windows XP Migration Project
Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI), one of South Korea’s largest companies, transitioned virtual desktop users to the VMware View virtual desktop infrastructure running Windows 7 with the announced end-of-support for Windows XP in 2014. The initial migration project targeted 1,800 of the company’s 3,000 virtual desktop users. HHI IT management became convinced that an automated solution was needed to make a large-scale migration possible when they saw how much time was required to accomplish it manually. Knowing that they needed to move quickly, Hyundai turned to Liquidware Labs partner Daou Tech, a leading South Korean IT services company. From its experience working with numerous VDI projects across both VMware and Citrix platforms, Daou Tech knew that existing migration tools from Microsoft and platform vendors were not up to the task for a migration project of this size. Daou Tech staff worked with HHI IT staff to migrate the group of 1,800 Windows XP users to VMware View desktops. Using ProfileUnity, the feat was accomplished in approximately three weeks.
Most of the migrations were carried out after peak work hours to avoid interfering with day-to-day operations or diverting IT staff from other projects. Because ProfileUnity performs anytime migrations in the background, worker productivity was not affected. The desktops undergoing migration were functional throughout the process, and the cutover to Windows 7 was smooth. In fact, at one point the team completed 250 migrations in a single night. ProfileUnity launches a very tiny agent on the existing physical PC to start the migration process, which is completely automated through key activities that support a clean and safe migration:
- ProfileUnity automatically virtualizes user profiles and settings, and syncs mission-critical user-authored data to network or cloud storage.
- ProfileUnity offers an exclusive automatic data migration feature in its folder redirection module to ensure that no mission-critical user-authored data is left behind.
- ProfileUnity seamlessly makes users’ custom application-data settings available across disparate versions of almost any application.
For the final cutover, virtualized user preferences and user data are merged with the master golden desktop image, providing a workspace that is completely personalized and ready to use when the user initially logs on to the virtual platform. After migrations, ProfileUnity provides complete enterprise user virtualization with flexible profile management and configuration.
HHI’s communication messenger application presented a hurdle during the migration: the program had been customized, causing configuration data problems in the Windows registry. Daou Tech and Liquidware Labs staff quickly found that parts of the application were spread across the registry. Using the configuration flexibility in ProfileUnity, the team wrote a script that scanned all registry locations to collect the data needed for migration. The troubleshooting process and problem resolution were completed in about a day.
Automating the migration with ProfileUnity transformed the entire project, as HHI would have been hard-pressed to commit the staff resources and time allotment required for a manual migration using USMT. ProfileUnity also proved to be economical; it runs as a virtual appliance on a VMware host, so no additional back-end systems were needed to get the solution up and running quickly. And with such minimal impact on IT staff and workers using the desktops, HHI management’s concerns about the project were allayed.
