VMware Mirage is a very powerful tool that does wonders with Windows migration, and should be in the arsenal of every enterprise desktop admin.
In recent projects I’ve worked on, I came across customers with Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP). Though a great AV product and has nice capabilities, there is something it does that can cause headaches to the migration team. Although the experiences are for Windows XP to Windows 7, I would expect it to be the same with migration from Windows 7 to Windows 8 and above.
The issue that is likely to happen is that after migration, user profiles remain empty. So when users login to their endpoint after migration will not see their files in their “My Documents”, “Desktop”, etc. The files are not gone, but just not properly migrated over from the old “Documents and Settings” location to “Users”.
This happens because of SEP’s tamperproof protection. Details on setting up tamperproof protection found > http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO55213
Mirage makes use of Microsoft USMT to execute the migration of user profiles. What gets tricky is that SEP’s Tamperproof Protection will get in the way of USMT, and so prevents USMT from doing it’s job.
VMware has recognized this issue and published a KB article http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2068849. I will let you read up there on the possible workarounds that can be applied. There are also 2 versions of SEP which Mirage will be able to automatically disable during USMT process.
Now, my experience tells me that SEP is not the only reason USMT migration can fail. Watch out for the next post which goes into the other possible reason why USMT can fail.