Best Practice Calls for the Latest RU

Per best practice, all SEPMs and SEP 11 clients in an organization should migrate to the latest available software Release Update (RU) as soon as it becomes available. This ensures that management components and endpoints can take advantage of the most recent enhancements and improvements. For specific information on migrating to the latest release, please see Migration documents for Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.

SEP 11 Infrastructure Will Function with Different Releases

However, maintaining a consistent release version across all SEPMs and SEP 11 clients in an organization is not a requirement for support. It is supported to have newer SEPMs managing older SEP 11 clients, and older releases of the SEPM should be able to successfully manage SEP 11 clients that have a newer version of the software. These configurations are not recommended, but can arise as complex organizations perform testing and trials in accordance with their change management policies.

Please note that there are instances where the latest release is necessary on both SEPM and SEP 11 client to completely correct a known issue. Symantec Technical Support can provide details and will recommend upgrading both SEPMs and SEP 11 clients in these instances.

Maintain a Consistent RU Level on all SEPMs

If there are multiple SEPMs in an organization, a consistent version of the software should be maintained upon them all. Replication failures and other complications will arise if separate sites are operating with different releases of the database schema.




Technical Information
Please note that mixed versions are only supported within the same product. SEP 11 clients and management components cannot interact with SEP 12 clients and SPCs. SEP 11 cannot, as well, interact with older Symantec Antivirus 10.x technologies.