Anyone survived a Windows to Linux user workstations migration?

[u/Halomora]

Hey fellow sys admin,

I work at a VFX/animation studio (~400 users).

We're kicking off a project to migrate our artist workstations from Windows 10/11 VDIs to Linux. Flavor is pretty much locked it ll be Rocky Linux 9 with KDE.

I am curious if there's anyone here who's been through a similar workstation migration to linux?

What Linux flavor, did you end up on, and would you pick the same again?

How did you handle what GPOs used to give you?

For the Base OS deployment/imaging, did you use Kickstart + Puppet/Ansible, or something else?

Anything that looked easy on paper and turned into a one big pile of {Jurassic_Park}?

Tools that made your life easier along the way?

I am looking for any war stories, good or bad!

Thank you!

[u/GrandpaJoe7]

My predecessor started with foreman and puppet and CentOS7 to manage all hardware and VM deployments back in 2015ish (before my time here). We PXE boot for the initial deployment using foreman and then puppet takes over from there and applies configs based on the host group assigned to the endpoint.

We have since migrated to RHEL 9 and Satellite. We also moved from VMWare to OpenShift. Thought about Ansible, but we have so many custom puppet modules, lift and shifting all of that seems like more work than it’s worth right now. The whole puppet/openvox thing may force our hand though.

We aren’t VFX, but we do a lot of image processing in GIS related space and run our own HPC. Before being acquired by a megacorp, all desktop workstations were Linux. Now we have to use Megacorp SOE Windows laptops but end users will RDP into their RHEL Linux workstations or a shared interactive server running Gnome (XRDP works pretty well) to do those workflows. Our network is entirely internal behind the megacorp’s zscaler network so is only accessible from inside.

[u/davy_crockett_slayer → u/GrandpaJoe7]

Do you guys run iPXE? I've been looking into DeployR.

[u/GrandpaJoe7 → u/davy_crockett_slayer]

Just a simple Kickstart PXElinux BIOS for older machines and UEFI for newer machines. Satellite runs a little tftp server and matches the MAC to the initial boot loader configs for you.

Used to be the same process with VMs on VMWare but for OpenShift Virtualization, we now provision the vm in OpenShift directly with a yaml and the register it back to Satellite to get the host group info and puppet agent for post build configurations.

[u/davy_crockett_slayer → u/GrandpaJoe7]

Smart. Thanks for the info.

[u/Halomora → u/GrandpaJoe7]

Thank you very much for sharing this, it's pretty much what we gonna stick with, rocky9/foreman/puppet/vmware