Deployment and Imaging Group

We are gearing up to implement Altiris 7.5 CMS and want to leave our existing 7.1 infrastructure intact and migrate them over as needed to 7.5. One, is it possible? Two is there any guides to assist in the process?

There should be no reason why they couldn't exist together so long as you don't have overlapping discovery rules or automation policies to install agents.  The last thing you'd want is clients being in a tug of war between the different SMP servers.

Not considering turning on discovery or automation for client installs. In the test environment we will only have a few clients to test with and will bring them in manually as needed. At some point after testing we will bring a new systems in and migrate all the clients to get them off the 7.1 system.

I don't think any of the automation clients installs are on by default in 7.5, correct?

It is not documented but it is implied. You do know that you can set NS7.5 only to talk to 7.5 clients.

You can also disable “7.1 to 7.5” plugin upgrade. So your that your production 7.1 clients don’t accidently get upgraded to 7.5. As you can see there are multiply ways for both 7.1 and 7.5 to co-exist.

Thanks, good things to keep in mind for sure. From what I am gathering the premise is that it can be done. I am working out the details of the testing and what it will look like to migrate site servers once the clients have moved to 7.5. So any tidbits of info are helpful.

Once 7.5 has the same software objects in its console as your 7.1 systems (except for the 7.1 agents and plugins of course), and has access to their physical files, you can simply redirect their SMA to the 7.5 SMP so that their SMA and package service gets upgraded.

You will probably want to use the software replikator tool to ensure that the software object guids match.

If you don't want to migrate your 7.1 software to 7.5, then simply remove the package service via the 7.1 site settings page, and then redirect the SMA after the package servuice has been removed from the actual site servers in question.