Merlinos Mills is a company that produces flours and grains for grocery stores. It owns mills and distribution centers in the Northwestern and Midwestern United States. The headquarters in Bend, Oregon employs more than 400 people, most of whom use computers. Also, the headquarters has 28 servers, all running Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Edition. The company employees use Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Mac OS X El Capitan.

The management of Merlinos Mills wants each department to upgrade to newer OSs. Also, they are very concerned about network security, and they want to install new servers and upgrade their current servers to OS versions that take better advantage of security features. Your role in the process is to work with each department to help ensure that the installations and upgrades go smoothly.

1-The master distribution center in Bend, Oregon houses 42 employees, including 22 people using Windows 7 Professional and 20 people using Windows 8.1. The distribution center is slated to upgrade its computers to Windows 10 Pro. What preliminary steps should be taken before starting the upgrades on these computers? In general, are there any problems involved in upgrading to Windows 10 from each of these OSs?

2-The distribution center's Windows 7 users are all certain they need to upgrade to Windows 10 to perform their work. However, the people in the distribution center who are running Windows 8.1 are currently able to use all software, such as office software, customized distribution software, and inventory software that is integrated with the distribution software. They are resisting the upgrade to Windows 10, and the distribution manager asks for your opinion about whether to upgrade these computers. Should they upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10?

3-The IT department has already been testing Windows Server 2019, and some time ago purchased licenses to convert its Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Edition servers to Windows Server 2019 Standard Edition. Two of the servers are running the Server Core installation of Windows Server 2012 R2. Management wants all servers to run Windows Server 2019 with a GUI installation. In addition, a new high-performance server has been purchased with the intent of making it a virtualization server. Management wants to reduce the number of physical servers from 28 to 20. Explain the general process the department must follow to convert to Windows Server 2019 and reduce the number of physical servers.