As a Symantec Altiris 7 Early Adopter Program (EAP) Implementation Partner and Symantec Altiris Platinum Partner, Intuitive will provide unique insight into your Altiris 7 migration efforts. We can assess Altiris 7 readiness, answer questions, and create an Altiris 6 to Altiris 7 roadmap for your organization's migration to Altiris 7. We specialize in Symantec Altiris consulting services to assist companies with managing and supporting their IT infrastructure.

Find out today if your organization is ready to upgrade to Altiris Client Management Suite (CMS) 7 and Altiris Server Management Suite (SMS) 7.

Altiris 7 Features

Altiris 7 has several key features that will help companies manages computing devices that are found in several different environments. These environments may see challenges such as high client count greater than 500,000 devices, physically diverse or separated locations around the globe, or politically segmented environments that wish to be managed under an enterprise scaled toolset. Each one of these situations can present daunting challenges when designing an infrastructure that allows for a flexible yet stable environment.

Design and Implementation Considerations

• Hierarchy Topology

• First, understand that each Notification Server can have zero or one parent. Second, each Notification Server can have zero or more children. Third, designing hierarchy in such a manner that it is extremely wide and shallow (Figure 1-A) or narrow and deep (Figure 1-B) can have a direct impact on the ability for Replication schedules to have enough time to complete before the next scheduled time begins.
  
  
  Figure 1-A: Wide and Shallow
  
  
  Figure 1-B: Narrow and Deep
  
  
  Figure 1-C: 3x5 Hierarchy
  
  The goal is to have a hierarch topology that contains itself no wider than five and no deeper that three tiers (Figure 1-C). Designing an infrastructure with this goal in mind will ensure that there is not an overload of clients and replicated data for any one data path.

• Site Server

• Clients that are directly managed by a notification server will only communicate to site servers that are available as defined by site maintenance. If an environment has more than one notification server with multiple clients communicating from a remote location where a need for a site server is defined; the remote site may have more than one site server.
  
  
  
  For the above scenario; in a three tier hierarchy, a package is created at NS A, replicated to NS B, then replication from NS B to NS C. If a package server from NS C needs the package, will it ever go to the package server on NS A?
  
  A package server will only go to its direct Notification Server or parent to get the package. It is assumed that a least one package server on NS B will have the package at some point, and if not the package server on NS C will back-off until that time.

• Maintenance Policies

• Maintenance windows are policies that define a duration of time or “window” that assigned tasks are allowed to execute.
  
  When multiple Maintenance Window policies are applied to a computer, task execution is permitted during any available window. The Altiris Agent checks to see if any windows are “activated” at the time of a scheduled job or task execution. No Maintenance Window policy or an expired Maintenance Window policy will cause task execution to be permitted at any time. If a Maintenance Window expires during job execution, the job will be allowed to finish. Installation of solution agent “plug-ins” and default Inventory policies ignore Maintenance Window Policies. The default installation of Notification Server 7 has NO maintenance window policies enabled.
  
  Maintenance windows are designed to primarily control when a user initiated deployment is allowed to execute, rather than controlling built-in or solution based policy.

• SQL Backend

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  Notification Server 7 supports SQL Server 2005 only. It is recommended that SP2 be installed. The Temp Database should be located on separate physical disc.

• Migration Process from 6 to 7

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  When preparing an existing Notification Server 6, it is recommended that all Altiris 6 solutions be upgraded at the same time to get them to the required versions for export. Clean the NS 6 database prior to export to remove unneeded data. Export all data from the NS 6 database and plan to import only the data classes, resources, reports, collections and notification policies needed on the new Notification Server 7. Items exported from Notification Server 6 are placed in a flat file database. The flat file can be filtered and consolidated to ensure only the data needed is imported to the Notification Server 7 database.

The information provided on this site has been compiled to help review the fundamentals and benefits of the new platform. In no way has this information been officially reviewed by Symantec. The information has been compiled over the beta and Early Adaptor Program of Altiris 7 CMS/SMS. It is to be use as a framework of knowledge that will continue to grow as the solutions continue to expand. Any information provided should be tested in a non-production environment to verify validity in existing environments as there are no guarantees that results will be exactly the same. Information is subject to change.