Install Altiris Agent on ESX

We all know how much money is saved with going virtual where possible. And with the advances in virtual technologies, this area is growing faster every year. With that said, you have probably figured out that I strongly believe Virtual Environments are the way of the future, just like wireless, grid, and cloud computing.

As stated before, we are a TMS client, and install our Altiris Agents exclusively on our servers. Needless to say, we have many *NIX servers (over 11,000) and all with an Altiris agent on them. The ESX platform being one of them. With over 600 ESX servers (mostly 3.0.1) they have a slightly different OS configuration that a standard Altiris agent installation procedure will not work out of the box.

With the help of my ESX guru, we have developed a script that will install the Altiris agent on the node that the script is ran from. Depending on your environment, specifically firewall and security configurations, this script may work as-is, or with minor tweaks:

#!/bin/bash
mkdir /tmp/altirisagent
cd /tmp/altirisagent
chkconfig firewall --level 2345 off
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-firewall --AllowIncoming
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-firewall --AllowOutgoing
ftp -n <
user anonymous rdp
cd /path/to/your/AltirisAgent
binary
prompt
mget aex-agent-install-config.xml
mget aex-bootstrap.gz
quit
EOF2
cd /tmp/altirisagent
mv aex-agent-install-config.xml .aex-agent-install-config.xml
#chmod u+x
gunzip aex-bootstrap.gz
chmod u+x aex-bootstrap
./aex-bootstrap http://yourNS.serverhere.com
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-firewall --BlockIncoming
/usr/sbin/esxcfg-firewall --BlockOutgoing 
esxcfg-firewall --openPort 52028,tcp,in,AltirisAgent
esxcfg-firewall --openPort 52029,udp,in,AltirisAgent
esxcfg-firewall --openPort 80,tcp,out,AltirisAgent
esxcfg-firewall --openPort 80,udp,out,AltirisAgent  

If you place the above lines in a file on one of your ESX 3.x servers, give it execute permissions with this command:

chmod 755 

and then run it as root. One minute later you will have an awesome Altiris Agent up and running on your ESX host.

Thank you.