Windows 7 Early Adopter: What Parts of the Altiris Notification Server 6.x Platform Work in Windows 7?

NOTE: The following statements are strictly the opinion of the poster, are intended to inform the community of the poster's particular experience.

Windows 7. It's fast, it's sleek. It's coming. Sooner for some than others.

We're in the process of vetting our applications for early adoption to the Windows 7 platform as part of a legal requirement at year's end to achieve drive encryption compliance. The intention of this article, therefore, is to give you an updated look at how the Altiris agents, in NS, and DS, are or can operate at the time of this writing, 09-09-09.

I'll mention here that with Windows 7 come some new technologies and subsequent challenges that each of us as enterprise endpoint manager's need to consider. I'll be addressing those in a separate article in the coming weeks.

First, here's a rundown of each agent, and how our testing went:

A. The Altiris NS Agent 6.0.2399 - Installed well, and has been stable on both 64-bit and 32-bit installations. We have approximately 300 32-bit clients Windows 7 clients running this version of the agent. Bear in mind that Windows 7 machines will, at the time of this writing, need to be separated into their own collection and assigned the policies necessary for inventory and agent updating.

B. Altiris Software Delivery Solution Agent 6.1.1016 - Installed by policy with no issues.

C. Script, Service Control, And Software Delivery Agents for Task Server: All installed without issue or error.

D. Inventory Agent Package and Rule Agent - Installed without issue, Inventory reported properly after assigning tasks to the Windows 7 Computers Collections

The Software Portal: Properly assigns and displays software assigned to users in the domain environment. Software delivery packages compatible with Windows 7 install properly.

Patch Management for Windows 7: Currently, The updates for Microsoft Office 2007 do show up and recognize prior installation. I haven't yet had a situation where new Office patches have been staged and deployed to workstations without the patches already deployed. I will update this if any issues are found.

Important to know about Patching in Windows 7: Microsoft will not make patches formally available to workstations, IT departments, or Automatic updates until October 22nd, 2009. Users of Microsoft's TechNet site can access and download some platform updates from their Technet subscriptions, or from the Microsoft Update Catalog for Windows 7, located here.

Beta releases of Windows 7 have received some patches through automatic updates, as has Internet Explorer 8. Our plan is to leave Automatic Updates turned on in our initial image until a clearer path is made available from both Microsoft and Symantec.

Carbon Copy

Carbon Copy in its native form is not supported by Microsoft, Windows 7, or Symantec. However, utilizing the Remote Desktop option, where we:

A. Enable Remote Services from the Windows Control Panel
B. Grant access to our Active Directory group of Carbon Copy Users
C. Modify the local or group policy over the specific machines to allow remote access using Full Control.

Settings for this are located under Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Remote Desktop Services, Remote Desktop Session Host, Connections.

Deployment Server

Windows 7 is fully supported in Deployment Server 6.9 SP3. We are currently undergoing an upgrade of our Deployment Server platforms to support a smooth SP3 migration. We have a development server running SP3, and can confirm agent connectivity with the 7.0 platform. 7.0 is supported under the DAgent platform, and was installed using the Dagent.msi, which is the recommended approach.

By running under the Dagent.msi wrapper, the proper version of code will automatically be selected for your 32 or 64-bit platform.

We have successfully deployed software and used the DS Remote control functions with the latest SP3 DAgent builds. The platform seems much more stable, which for DS, which is already quite stable, is an added bonus.