Support for Asset/CMDB Solutions being in a hierarchy or data being sent by stand-alone replication rules depends on which version of the products/Symantec Management Platform is being used.

Symantec Management Platform 7.1 SP2 and higher

• Hierarchy: This is supported. For this to work, Asset/CMDB must be on the Parent server only and Asset/CMDB cannot be on any Child servers.
• Stand-alone-replication rules: These are custom and are not supported. While they will work for reporting only if all needed data is forwarded, other features have not been tested outside of the hierarchy and are not guaranteed to work.
• Technical explanation:
  
  Because of the nature of Asset/CMDB, it is very beneficial to have a single source of information, i.e., the parent server of a hierarchy. Based on this, a decision was made to set the products Data Connector, CMDB and Asset as well as many others to be Non Replicable. If any resource is created through one of these solutions they will not be able to be replicated up or down the hierarchy. This promotes much better data consistency and lessons any chances that data could become corrupt, due to changes done by different users/administrators on the various child and parent servers.
  
  The design is that Resources and their data should move up the Hierarchy and Settings, Policies, Security etc should move down the hierarchy. Asset and Core merging would then be used on one server (the parent), should the need exist due to duplicates of any kind.
   

Symantec Management Platform 7.1 and 7.1 SP1

• Hierarchy: This is not supported. However, Asset/CMDB must still be be on the Parent server only, but not in the hierarchy.
• Stand-alone replication rules: These are supported. However, these can only forward inventory to the Asset/CMDB server, not from the Asset/CMDB server.

Symantec Management Platform 7.0

• Hierarchy: This is not supported.
• Stand-alone replication rules. These are not supported.
• Note: Asset/CMDB 7.0 were not designed to be used in a hierarchy, which is not a supported architecture, or with stand-alone replication rules. Attempting to add them as part of one will result in unexpected issues.
    

Related Information

Each Symantec Management Platform server is capable of handling up to 20,000 active client managed nodes when properly equipped and configured.  If less than 20,000 nodes are being managed, hierarchy should not be implemented. Refer to the following article for more information about server hardware configuration:

Altiris™ IT Management Suite 7.1 SP1 from Symantec™ Planning and Implementation Guide
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=DOC3464&key=55274&actp=LIST