Windows 7 Migration: Analyzing hardware readiness using Normalize CM

As promised in my blog, Windows 7 Migration: Analyzing software readiness using Normalize CM, here is the follow-up blog describing how to analyze hardware readiness.

I won’t bore you with the details about why you need to be migrating from Window XP to either Windows 7 or Windows 8. I did so in the previous blog so I hope you already understand that.

Let’s just jump right into how Normalize CM from BDNA will help you prepare to migrate to a new version of Windows. Currently Normalize CM ships with Windows 7 migration readiness reports but I’ve been assured that the Windows 8 migration readiness reports will follow shortly behind the release of service pack 1 for Configuration Manager 2012.

Normalize CM ships with about a dozen Windows 7 readiness hardware reports. In this blog I am going to focus on just two of those.

I find a great starting place, when planning a migration, is to get a high level overview of what’s in the environment. The first of these two reports, aptly titled, “Summary of Windows 7 Readiness” shows a nice high level look at things. As you can see this report can be limited by collection.

 

From there I can see that I am in pretty good shape as far as meeting the minimum system requirements recommended by Microsoft.

Of course I do see a small number of machines that are not compatible with Windows 7 and I see a summary of what component(s) of the machines are preventing them from being compatible.

I naturally need to know which machines these are which brings me to the next report I will focus on today which is “Windows 7 Incompatibility Reason”

This report lists each machine that does not meet the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 7 and the reason why.

As you can see I have several old white box machines and a couple old Dell computers that must be upgraded or replaced rather than migrated.

 

It’s likely not many of us will base our decision which machines to migrate of off Microsoft recommended minimum requirements, however this is a good starting point. Once you have gotten past this point it’s very easy to export these reports, edit the SQL query just a bit so that the report meets your internal minimum standards. You can then upload that as a custom report.

 

As always I have edited my screen shots a bit in order to obfuscate my actual machine names and computer counts. This may cause the info in the screen shot to appear inaccurate when that’s not the case. You should go out and get the free demo of Normalize CM and try it out for yourself.