Altiris Best practise for deploying / managing software on machines / images? (Just got Altiris in)
Hi,
We've just had Altiris Installed, having been using Symantec Livestate for several years.
The products work differently, Livestate was more about manageing a machine from out of the box, it only knew about software it installed.
I'm trying to think of the best way to use Altiris. We can create images with software pre installed (Is this the best way to go or install all after the base image?) but then how would you manage the PC in terms of putting it in specific collections, which have software assigned to it, as if you do that with an image with software all installed, it will go off and try and re-install the software (and fails in some cases where it already exists).
Does something have to be put in the install scripts to go off and check files / folders / registry settings to see if software is installed before trying to install said software? or is there a better was in Altiris? I was looking at task server, but that appears to excecute a series of tasks, and you can't make installations conditional as far as I can see.
Thanks,
Sukh
Collections
You will want to set up collections for all your software delivery items. You can do this in a variety of ways and I would suggest reading up on the support documents. Are you currently using version 6 or 7? All the documentation can be found here: http://www.altiris.com/Support/Documentation.aspx with the software management doc specifically for version 7 here: http://www.altiris.com/upload/software_mgmt_user_g...
There are a variety of ways to deliver software packages with tasks, policies, etc. All of the delivery comes down to collections. You can set your collections based on inventory or software, add/remove programs, pretty much anything you can think of. When the collection is set to auto update, only the machines in the collection will get the software package.
skhudy, IanAtkin wrote an 4
skhudy,
IanAtkin wrote an 4 or 5 part series of articles concerning Software Delivery, and it is truly outstanding work. You can view part one here:
http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/building-better-collections-software-delivery
The other parts are linked at the end of each article.
Thanks,
Kyle
Symantec Trusted Advisor
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Images
As far as creating images, a lot of it depends on your environment. Best practices say that you should make your images as barebones as possible. If you bundle your image with a specific version of an application, you will most likely have to re-create the image from scratch if you ever need to update that software. Not to mention it cuts down on the size of the image tremendously.
A great example is if you created an image 3 years ago and it had Adobe Reader 6 and Office 2003. Fast forward to today and your company now uses Office 2007 as the standard, and Adobe is up to 9.0. Your options would be to do an upgrade install on the newly imaged machine or to go back into the image, uninstall Office 2003 and install Office 2007 which will inevitibly leave behind registry rot and potentially cause future issues down the road.
If you left the software installs outside the image, your deployment times would be increased as you'd have to account for the time to install software post-image, but it leaves you with less of a headache when it comes to maintaining the images.
Plus, this also gives you a single universal image that is applicable to any part of your organization. You're not locked into having CAD software installed on your help desk's PC's or Photoshop installed on your finance PC's.
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