Archives: Service News

Nebula has been hard at work getting ready for Windows 10 for many months. Since this is a popular topic of interest, here’s a status update.

Basic Readiness

If you want to deploy a computer with Windows 10 enterprise, you can do that now. Contact us if you need help with that. The most basic of our processes are ready for that, but at this time, there are significant limitations to our support capabilities (see Full Support below), so we’d suggest you hold off a month.

If you wait a month, the story will improve significantly, and if you wait a couple months, we hope to manage the upgrade for you (see Special New Capabilities below).

Looking further out, we’ll be adjusting the specific operating systems we support (see Consequences of a New Windows OS below).

We plan to have more detailed messaging about Windows 10 support in the future, covering expectations and actions to take if you are ready to upgrade.

Full Support

There are several missing support capabilities which might lead you to delay a little longer:

1. We do not yet have a Windows 10 image. We plan to have one ready within the next couple of months.
2. There is not yet a Sophos version (the anti-virus software supported by Nebula ) released in Nebula that is compatible with Windows 10. The vendor has released a compatible version, but Nebula has a policy of not deploying the latest version to avoid “broken” versions (which have happened often enough in the past to justify this). If a newer Sophos version doesn’t come out by 8/30/2015, we’ll manually override our policy to address this.
3. We have not yet had a chance to evaluate and implement the configuration settings needed to support Windows 10 in a managed environment like ours.
4. We do not yet support basic computer inventory or software distribution to Windows 10. This capability is blocked by a project to update our software delivery and management system. With the Nebula file service design change complete and more engineering resources available in September, we plan to complete this in September.

With respect to #3, we expect that some of these settings will represent major changes to the status quo. For some of these settings, we are still waiting on information from Microsoft while for others, we simply need time to figure out what’s new and plan our desired design. For example, with Windows 10 Microsoft plans to change how updates work. We know this means our existing mechanism that allows customers to defer IE upgrades has reached its end (Microsoft’s stated end of life for IE8-10 on 1/12/2016 is another reason that mechanism has reached end of life) . But Microsoft hasn’t fully shared the details of the update options it imagines for enterprise customers, so we still need time to evaluate what our approach will be.

If you do choose to deploy Windows 10 in Nebula at this time, you should expect that we will implement settings that will affect you later.

Special New Capabilities

Nebula plans to build a new operating system deployment mechanism. We’re hoping to provide an automated upgrade in place experience as part of this new mechanism, which would save you time and money, cut down on our overall costs, and improve our future agility to new operating system releases. We do not have an estimate for when this capability will be ready–it partially depends on the project to update our software deliver and management system, but also will require additional work. We’re hoping to have this ready in the Fall timeframe.

Consequences of a New Windows OS

Nebula has long had a policy of supporting the most recent OS, plus one prior OS, with a grace period for previous OSes, but hasn’t been especially clear which OSes were specifically supported. That’s been addressed in a new document: https://it.uw.edu/wares/nebula/operating-system-and-browser-support/

The short version with respect to Windows 10 is that it’s supported, but with limited capabilities (see above). We’ll continue to consider Windows 7 supported as the prior OS we will continue to support. After we’ve addressed #1-4 noted above, we’ll consider Windows 8.1 to be in a grace status for a year–in other words, we’d like anyone running Windows 8.1 to upgrade to Windows 10. We’re choosing to drop support for Windows 8.1 instead of Windows 7, following Microsoft’s lead in terms of the support it is providing.

The intention here is not to inconvenience anyone, but to encourage everyone to move to a well-supported operating system, so we’ll tweak our plans as needed to follow that intention. So if for some reason, we don’t provide the automated upgrade capability for quite a long time, we’ll extend the grace period for Windows 8.1.

Changing from Nebula2 to UW NetID login 

The Nebula service has set a goal for its UW-IT customers to stop using their Nebula2 user accounts and switch to using their NETID user accounts before April 2015. This is part of a larger initiative consolidating Windows domains, supports the IM Infrastructure Refresh project, and is a blocker for several other Nebula goals such as splitting off a separate Software Distribution Service.

Any customer can make the switch themselves. Hundreds of other Nebula customers have made the switch to only using a NETID user account, and there is no risk to trying the switch because you can revert back to using the Nebula2 user account. There is helpful documentation to assist customers that want to do this self-service at https://it.uw.edu/wares/nebula/contact-us/news/netid-logins/.

Alternatively, Nebula will provide 30 minutes of assistance (at no additional cost beyond the Nebula core fee) to help customers make the switch. We will have dedicated staff available during a specific period for your UW-IT division, but you can also send a request for help at any time to help@uw.edu. If you believe you are no longer using your Nebula2 user account, you can send a request to disable the account, which will help you ensure you don’t have any hidden lingering dependencies on it.

UW file service comparisons 

If you have been wondering what your options are for file sharing now that the H and I drive usage will become billable service, a cost and file comparison list has been compiled and ready for your viewing. Just click this link to view the following chart to compare the capabilities provided by various UW file services.

We have also included information on the differences between the H:drive and the U:drive. More on this is here.

We are approaching the 1^st FY16 monthly billing cycle for Nebula. This is an informational update so you have a chance to update information feeding that billing cycle. We are also providing an update on our plans related to removing Nebula resources that are not claimed (paid for).

What and When:

Earlier today, Nebula processed all the eligibility groups for departments for the first time, re-assigning users based on the membership of your eligibility group.

This was the bulk user “purge” we asked everyone to patiently wait for—thanks for waiting, it saved us a lot of time and kept our costs down. For many reasons, we didn’t actually purge any users—we simply just marked users who no one claimed for their department for later action (more about that below). If you review your users in MyIT, you will see that it reflects your eligibility groups.

Nebula will submit billing charges for July 2015 at the end of the month.

You can review your expected charges for Nebula file services and Nebula desktops via MyIT. What is represented in MyIT is based on 3 things:

1. Which desktops are assigned to your department
2. Which users are in your department’s eligibility group, which by extension determines which Nebula home directories are associated with your department
3. Which shared file service paths or Windows file service paths are assigned to your department

You can expect that what you see in MyIT is what we’ll submit billing charges for.

With respect to our plans for Nebula resources who have no one willing to pay for them, here are our intentions:

• We will remove access to the home directories of users who are no longer in an eligibility group. All Nebula home directories have a snapshot with a 1 year retention beyond deletion, so even if something is undesired now but you later need access, this is a fallback. We plan to delay deletion of undesired home directories for a month to provide a grace period for mistakes.
• We will remove access to shared file service paths which have no department assigned. Prior to doing so, we plan to contact all users who have access to the file service path to let them know of the impending action, so there is an opportunity for a department to step forward and pay to continue. Again, we plan to delay deletion for a month to provide a grace period.

There are other Nebula configuration we will take action on in the future. Future actions we’ll take include removing “unclaimed” user accounts (and by extension access) on the shared file services, removing access to Nebula VPN services, and removing the “Nebula supported” flag which the UW-IT service desk uses in routing requests.

What you need to do:

The mechanisms we’ve created over the last 4 months and may not be as accurate as everyone would like. Since there will be billing charges based on these soon as well as the additional actions I mentioned, it would be best to fix up any inaccuracies now.

If you are a contact for a Nebula department, here are the specific things you should do to review:

• Go to MyIT and review the ‘Users in My Department’ report: https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaUsers.aspx. This should only include the users in your eligibility group. If there are missing or additional users, you need to update your eligibility group. NOTE: if you visited MyIT this morning, you are very likely to see a different set of users listed now because we processed the eligibility groups for the first time today. We plan to process eligibility groups once daily, so if you do make changes, you should expect MyIT to reflect those changes the following day.
• Go to MyIT and review the ‘File Services’ report: https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/fileServices.aspx. This should only include those group directories and home directories for your department (i.e. that you will pay for). If there are missing or additional paths, then send a request to help@uw.edu to resolve the file service assignments. If the amount of usage for a given file service path is unexpectedly large, you may want to take action to reduce the use to reduce your cost. If there are home directories you do not want, you can adjust your eligibility group membership. If you do not want to remove a user from your eligibility group, but also don’t want that user to have a Nebula home directory, we have a solution for that, but at this time you’ll need to send a request to help@uw.edu for that solution.

We are aware of a number of eligibility groups which have no members, and have separately already contacted departments where this is the case. You may need to take action if you were contacted about that.

We are aware of several shared file service paths which have no department assigned to them because our initial assignment was requested to be removed. As noted above, we plan to contact the users with access to these locations. You may need to take action if you are contacted about that in the future.

More info:

If you are wondering what a Nebula eligibility group is—see http://www.washington.edu/itconnect/wares/nebula/tools/view-and-manage-nebula-resources/#What.

If you are having problems getting your eligibility group to have the right set of users, we can provide a list of which users were associated with your department prior to today.

That document includes a variety of assistance for departmental contacts who use MyIT to review their Nebula use. We are happy to help you if you need further assistance or explanation—just send us a request at help@uw.edu.

Changes to the underlying billable time infrastructure Nebula uses to support Nebula consulting charges have occurred. This email outlines some of the consequences for Nebula customers.

What and When:

UW-IT began retiring the help request tool called RT a year ago, replacing it with a new system called UW Connect. Up until June 30, 2015, Nebula used RT to report billable time for consulting. On July 1, 2015, UW-IT discontinued the billable time capability of RT and replaced it with a similar capability in UW Connect. The new billable time capability in UW Connect does not work exactly the same as the old billable time capability in RT. The most notable difference is that there is no “budget approver” functionality. This was a functionality that allowed someone previously designated as a “budget approver” for a given budget to be alerted to new billable time records by automatically adding them to the email interactions.

What you need to do:

There is no action you must take, this announcement is informational only. You might choose to implement workarounds to meet any lost value due to this change.

More info:

Nebula billable time results from consulting charges when a request isn’t covered by the core Nebula desktop rate and we bill for the time spent to bring such a request to resolution. When this is the case, we ask for a valid budget and notify the customer that the request will result in additional charges.

For billable time, you should see the same level of detail in the monthly TSE bills that are generated.

The billing mechanism is owned by UW-IT Business and Finance. The decision to not provide an authorization/notification mechanism was made by UW-IT Business and Finance due to the lack of a central authority for all UW budgets for billable activities, as well as technical constraints in customizing the new help request system. Nebula’s previous authorization/notification capability was unique among UW-IT billable charges and required a highly customized tool to support it.

I recognize that this change represents less functionality, and many customers relied on the notification mechanism to have a higher degree of confidence about charges being incurred or to intercept requests for which your department has special procedures. UW-IT will definitely work with customers on charges that are not appropriate or excessive. If you’d like for us to track specific kinds of requests for your department and redirect those kinds of requests for help to you, please do let us know about those–we do track that kind of information already and are happy to expand this. Another workaround you might consider is to ask your users to copy you on their email to help@uw.edu–you would then be part of the interaction if we need to ask for a budget.

On a positive note, this change means Nebula support staff are no longer using two different help request systems to track your requests. Using both for a year has been a strain on us.

Back on 5/7, Nebula first asked that every department provide an eligibility group to update our records so we can accurately grant access and bill only for your current users. Many departments haven’t yet been able to provide an eligibility group. This has blocked our ability to purge old users, even for those departments that have provided an eligibility group. So Nebula is taking action on some department’s behalf to enable the service to move forward by creating temporary eligibility groups.

What and When:

This week we’ll be creating a temporary eligibility group for those Nebula departments which haven’t provided one to us yet. Initial membership for this temporary eligibility group will be based on our existing user department data at the point the group is created.

What you need to do:

When your department is ready to provide and assume management of an eligibility group of your Nebula users, we can rename and assign administration of the temporary eligibility group to you. Until that point, the membership and management of that temporary eligibility group will be frozen. Just send in a request when you are ready to do that.

Alternatively, you can also supply your own eligibility group and override the temporary eligibility group we’ve created. In that case, our temporary eligibility group will go away. If you’d like to provide your own eligibility group for your department, contacts for Nebula departments should visit https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaDepartments.aspx to supply that information. http://www.washington.edu/itconnect/wares/nebula/tools/view-and-manage-nebula-resources/#changeeligibility steps you through the process, if you need additional help.

If you are in the process of creating and populating your eligibility group, you’ll know we’ve created a temporary one if you see the field populated when you visit https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaDepartments.aspx. Feel free to override the value if that’s the case. J

More info:

Creating these temporary eligibility groups will allow Nebula to move forward on purging a large set of old users. This purge won’t be as complete as it could be with department provided eligibility groups from every department, but it will meet the service needs.

A MyIT release which permits adding budget information for group directories and default budgets for users and desktops is now available.

What and When:

As of this morning, MyIT includes new capabilities to set budget information along with some other updates. The changes include:

• On the “IT Things I Own/Manage -> Nebula File Services” page, aka https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/fileServices.aspx, there is now the ability to set budget on a per file directory basis.
• On each individual department page accessible from the “IT Things I Own/Manage -> Nebula Departments” page, aka https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaDepartments.aspx, there is now the ability to set a default user budget and a default desktop budget. The default user budget applies to any user in your department who doesn’t otherwise have a budget assigned—this would apply to a user home directory. The default desktop budget applies to any desktop in your department that doesn’t otherwise have a budget assigned.
• On the “IT Things I Own/Manage -> Nebula Users in My Department” page, aka https://support.nebula.washington.edu/myIT/myNebulaUsers.aspx, there is now a column indicating whether the user is a current faculty/staff.

What you need to do:

You can now review the budget information assigned to group directories, home directories, and desktops and adjust them as needed. For group directories and home directories, there is no existing budget so you will need to assign a budget to those items. Keep in mind that for home directories you can leverage the default user budget to assign a budget to all user home directories in your department.

More info:

Nebula is providing drop-in visit times to help customers navigate what they need to do. The drop-in visit times are listed here:

http://www.washington.edu/itconnect/wares/nebula/news/

More times will be added as necessary.

A general page that provides more detailed assistance on how to View and Manage Your Nebula Resources is at http://www.washington.edu/itconnect/wares/nebula/tools/view-and-manage-nebula-resources/.