Management bottleneck of MAC in Enterprise Environments (1)

Management bottleneck of MAC in Enterprise Environments

Preface:

The following is a summary of discussions with others at work and on the Internet, which has not been systematically organized. I hope to discuss it with other people and learn from them.

 

This discussion is actually very useful for different people:

• System Administrators can have a rough understanding of MAC integration in the system and make preliminary preparations, be aware of the internal user training and system implementation process. And handle the plan.
• Developers hope to start from this aspect and develop their own systems to solve these problems. This is an example of the market.
• For common users, you can also consider the difficulties of system administrators when blocking occurs in enterprise applications.

Finally, with the development of MAC, old problems will be gradually solved and new problems will emerge. Updating yourself at any time is also the only constant principle in the IT world.

 

 

Smooth system migration

This is the first bottleneck.

Smooth migration?

System migration occurs in many situations, such as computer update and replacement or operating system update. In an enterprise environment, it is a common task of system administrators. During the migration process, you need to migrate your local configuration, user local data, local applications, local network configuration, and so on to the new system. The so-called "smooth ", in addition to adapting to the new system, the end user will not feel the setbacks caused by migration, such as data loss or the need to reconfigure the infinite network. The Administrator tries his/her best to control the user experience's frustration to a certain acceptable and predictable level, and informs the user in advance.

 

Apple's support:

With the release of 10.5, the Apple system comes with the migration Assistant Program, which can help end users easily upgrade the system. This program provides strong functions, basically covering all possible requirements of common users. It supports migration of many applications, user data, and network configuration. Migration methods are also considerate, such as using Time Machine backup, network migration, disk image files, fireware/USB, etc. These are the most common and convenient resources.

Poor use:

However, this program is only applicable to small companies with individual users or a few people and is not suitable for large environments with dozens, hundreds or thousands of machines.

Why?

• First
  He needs too much manual intervention, occupying the Administrator's time and wasting all his time in the system step setting. In addition, in a large number of repetitive jobs, too many manual interventions are the most taboo. human intervention is the least likely to ensure quality. For important data, omissions and negligence may cause irreparable consequences.
• Second
  And cannot be combined with the system's automated deployment system. In this way, during system upgrade/migration, the administrator needs to set manual steps and manually configure each machine, which wastes time, faced with a large number of migration requirements, there will be considerable frustration. The progress cannot be guaranteed, and thus the main profit of the enterprise is reflected, which is more than the loss.
• Last
  Verification is also an impossible task. In general, it may only be for end users to experience and solve the problem. The problem is the quality of the migration process, it is still caused by system migration restrictions, or the compatibility of the new system itself, which requires the Administrator's experience and troubleshooting. If time is occupied by tedious and repetitive human resources, so how can we start troubleshooting errors? Adding manpower is also a challenge for enterprises.

Ideal migration:

After talking about this, what is the ideal enterprise-level system migration?

Ideally, it can be easily integrated into the existing automatic system deployment process to solve the network backup of local users/data and configurations. After the system deployment is complete, automatically restores user/data and configured networks, and ensures the integrity and traceability of migration. For administrators, the migration policies should be formulated at one time according to their own environment and requirements, and the automated workflow should be set accordingly (of course, the maintenance and update of daily policies and processes should still be done ), let the system complete all the migration steps on its own.

Current status:

Currently, all the administrators I have seen are responsible for migration based on their own enterprise environment, or allow users to undertake migration on their own, or provide limited migration guarantees, or share the migration responsibilities with users, in short, we make some compromises on quality and service.

A mature and practical system is urgently needed in the enterprise environment, and will be paid more and more attention to today and in the future when Mac systems are gradually accepted.

 

 

 

Write these statements today and update them later.