Migrating student home folders from one set of servers to another is normally an arduous event. But for one U.S. university’s IT department, it turned out to be easier than they could imagine.
The university had been using Senergy from Condrey Corporation for years to automatically provision student home folders in accordance with their class schedules. Senergy was the means of not only provisioning storage with the right access rights, but cleaning up any applicable student storage from the previous semester.
When the university upgraded their licenses of Windows Server, they decided to purchase some new server hardware that would replace their old servers. Many of these servers were hosting the student home folders. Reading the Senergy documentation, they learned that the product could migrate the folders, including all of the files, metadata, and permissions, by simply changing the “target path” (the location where the policy says the home folders are to be hosted) to a location on one of the new servers and then performing an “Enforce Policy Path Management Action.”
Upon doing so, the migration of what would be thousands of student network home folders would begin and continue over the weekend. Monday morning arrived and the IT staff saw that all of the home folders had been migrated without any issue.