In this section of videos, we're going to discuss upgrading Mackiewicz to a later version.
Now, when you upgrade the OS, all your applications users end user data will stay intact.
However, you should back up any important data just to be safe.
Now, if you're running an older version of Mac OS and are still using the best file system, that file
system will be upgraded and converted to APIs.
When you manage hundreds or thousands of machines, performing an OS upgrade to every machine can be
a daunting task.
So break the test down into smaller pieces, find small groups of alike machines that can be upgraded
and get those machines done first.
Use that experience to move on to larger groups and machines and keep getting groups of machines done
until you've upgraded all of your groups.
When you do this, wait some time between upgrading a group of machines and another group of machines.
You want to make sure that users have a time to report any issues that may not be immediately noticeable.
If, after a time, nobody's reporting any issues with your machines and most of your machines are configured
similarly, even if there's different hardware, then you can start aggressively picking up the pace
and get all of your machines upgraded.
When you try to put together an upgrade plan, make sure that you know what hardware you have is compatible
with the operating system that you're upgrading to on Apple's website, there is a detailed list of
computers that are compatible with each operating system.
Now, if you have a small amount of a particular type of computer and maybe an older group, it might
be a good idea to start the upgrade with those older or lesser used machines.
It might also be a good idea if you have a small batch of newer machines to start with, the newer ones.
I would just start with smaller batches to become familiar with the process and then work from there.
Also on Apple's website are more specific details about each Mac model and the latest operating system
that it's compatible with.
Now, if you take a look at the model identifier in this case, we have MacBook Pro eight, comma three.
This identifier is useful and can be filtered and identified in Apple remote desktop.
And in a moment, we're going to take a look at Apple remote desktop and we're going to see how we can
use it to keep track of our upgrade progress.
In addition to considering your hardware, you need to consider your software now on most software websites
is this system requirements page.
And if you look at the system requirements, it will often tell you what versions of the operating system
the software is compatible with.
Make sure that all the software that you use is compatible with the version of the operating system
that you're upgrading to.
Now, if you remember our section on smart lists, you'll remember that we had a smart list for high
Sierra that basically had of the computers running high Sierra on it.
Now, if our goal was to upgrade all of our high Sierra computers to Mojave, then this list, as we
upgrade these machines in it to Mojave, will get smaller and smaller until there's nothing left.
And so basically, we have a built in progress report of our status to our Mojave upgrade.
Now, when we show a bunch of computers and the list, we can also filter things down.
So I had mentioned the machine model ID and if we wanted to filter machines that ran hardware that was
not compatible with Mojave, we could go ahead and use our filters and just say, OK, MacBook Pro seven,
and you can see that we have nothing there.
But if we had MacBook Pro Sevens, then we know we would know that those couldn't be upgraded to Mojave.
All right, so another thing that you can do to filter out hardware or to get an idea of your hardware
is to take all of your high screen machines and run a report on them.
Now, I'm going to run a couple of simple hardware reports and storage reports so I can see how much
memory I have and how much disk space I have.
I don't want to perform OS upgrades on machines that just don't have enough hard drive space.
All right, so another thing that we could do is we could create a smart group of computers to upgrade
to Mojave.
Now you can keep changing the smart list parameters as you perform your upgrades.
And when it gets empty, you could go ahead and change your parameters.
So let's say right now we're showing that we have MacBook pros with four gigs of RAM or more.
Well, let's just say that we want to.
Find all of our machines that have four gigs of RAM or more, or we could see that that hasn't added
any more machines into our lives.
All right.
So we need to be less restrictive.
So let's go ahead and change to two gigs.
Now, I know from doing this that if I put two gigs, nothing comes up.
And if I change it to one point nine gigs, then I get more machines.
So these machines technically have two gigs, but dropping it to one point nine makes them appear in
the list.
So anyway, with the MacBook Pro having been upgraded, then we would have these machines and then we
can work on getting these machines down and we could keep changing the smart list parameters until we
keep winning things down.
Now, let's just say, for example, that all the computers in New York, room 110, were the same.
So we can make a smart list for those.
And we could also go ahead and do the operating system and we'll say greater than 10, 13.
And OS version is.
Less than 10, 14, so now we've got a smart list for our computers in New York, room 110, we have
to do all nine to any.
And so now we have our New York 110 machine.
So if the hardware and software and everything was similar in here, that would be a nice group to work
on.
And so we could go ahead and work on that.
So as you can see, using smart lists with Apple remote desktop, you can get a real time progress report
of your Mac OS upgrade status and you can use smart lists to filter and then keep re filtering groups
until you get all your groups done.