ludovic_ferre's blog

Should I say I hit a milestone today? I all cases I have to say that my migration from VMWare to Virtual Box Open Source Edition was a real success, and I can't see myself moving back away from Virtual Box for a good while.

I remember some thread on the old Altiris forum when people would ask if the Altiris Agent and Notification Server was a multi-threaded application capable of spreading its workload on many CPU or cores.

My answer back then was that the NS, SQL or the Altiris Agent are always capable of creating more threads than you would have cpu cores. It still holds to this day of course.

 So after we reviewed the inventory rules in the last post, today we are going to look at the registry entries on the client that drive the various PMS inventory components and policies.

The Altiris Agent comminucates to its managing Notification Server through a set of interfaces available via http/https on the NS. But given the number of computers that a NS can manage at any given time the concurrency aspects of this communication stack are not always easy to understand.

Thanks to the effort of individuals in the End Point management team we have the Single Rule Evaluator and Software Update Agent diagnostics available (see https://kb.altiris.com for details) to help with the core PMS Inventory rules: IsApplicable and IsInstalled.