Windows 10 fully supported in Active Directory

In early September we started to upgrade the servers 1A in the field to Active Directory (AD). Meanwhile, more than 150 servers have been migrated. Customers who have already received this upgrade can now start using Windows 10 without problems.

On the 27th of Juli, 2015, we published an article that Windows 10 was not supported yet. In it we reported that Windows 10 did work in our tests with AD. At that time progress on an upgrade path for all 1A-servers was already nearing completion.

Planning

Even though this upgrade progresses very smoothly until now, it is nonetheless a very significant change. That is why we are scaling up very carefully. It is expected that all 1A-servers will be migrated to Active Directory in July 2016.

When you wish to start using Windows 10 and you have not yet received a notice that your 1A-server will be converted to Active Directory, please contact your 1A-partner to receive your upgrade sooner.

The Active Directory upgrade

Companies with Windows servers who want (or need) to upgrade to a newer version are stuck to a time-consuming, difficult and expensive migration to a new server. 1A-servers are upgraded in a linear fashion by way of releases and servers in production never differ more than a few releases from each other. This ensures that server support for all the servers is nearly the same, which saves a hjuge amount of time and therefore cuts down expenses.

With this unique upgrade system, we have managed to accomplish even something as complex as a migration from a classic NT domain to AD almost flawlessly without our end customers having to buy a new server and having to undergo (and pay for) a full-fledged migration.

Of course there were some snags. For example, in AD users and groups cannot have the same name, which was allowed previously. And there were more similar issues. Most of these we were able to solve in advance, so that the actual upgrade could be done without problems.

This project once again proves the power of Linux and open source. With proprietary software this would have never been possible.