To upgrade the Altiris Agent and the agent plug-ins

1. Remove the sub-agents or agent plug-ins from all of the managed computers.

   Symantec recommends that you remove all agent sub-agents or agent plug-ins from your managed computers to avoid any potential problems during the upgrade process. However, on your package servers, you should also leave the Package Server Agent.

2. In Notification Server 6.x, redirect the managed computers to the 7.1 Notification Server.

   See About redirecting sites and agents to Notification Server 7.1.

   See Redirecting managed computers to Notification Server 7.1.

3. In Symantec Management Platform 7.1, use filters and targets to create a test group of clients on which to test the upgrade of the agent and the installation of the agent plug-ins.

   Note:

   If you did not remove a 6.x sub-agent, you would use an upgrade policy to install the 7.1 plug-in. However, because Software Management Solution, pcAnywhere Solution, and Inventory Solution, do not have an equivalent 7.1 product, you must use an installation policy to install the plug-ins for these products.

4. For the test group, enable the Symantec Management Agent upgrade policy.

5. For the test group, enable the installation policies for the agent plug-ins that correspond to the plug-ins that were installed on client computers before you migrated to 7.1.

6. For the test group, validate that policies, tasks, and other functionality works correctly.

7. For the rest of your client computers, repeat the preceding steps that you performed on the test group.

   You can broaden the scope a few thousand clients at a time. Symantec recommends that you do not upgrade more than 8,000 clients at the same time. You can upgrade up to 15,000 clients at the same time. However, you should then disable any policies and tasks that communicate frequently with the Symantec Management Agent.

8. For the clients that are not available during the migration, ask your network team to make the following change:

   • Delete the Altiris Notification Server 6.0 DNS A Record.

   • Create DNS Alias (CNAME) to direct the host name for Notification Server 6.x to Symantec Management Platform 7.1.

   Keep these settings in place until the upgrade of the agent and the agent plug-ins is completed on all of the remaining clients.