Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition

Hello,

I'm a new user of Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition 12.1 and I am evaluating it at the moment on a Windows Small Business Server Essentials 2011. I have installed the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager and the 'client' software on the server. Since then, the data-hard-disk of the server are not going into sleep-mode anymore (no spin-down). The problem occurred for the first time after I installed the 'client' software. Only the 'Manager' did not cause the problems.

I had a look in the resmon protocol - it seems that the frequent access to SYMEFA prevents a scheduled Spin-down of the hard-disks (spin-down after 20min in IDLE), if I set the time-limit e.g. to 2min, the spin-down occurs, but the HDD is starting again after a few minutes and accessing these files:

As the data-hard-disks (not the system-disk) should not run all the time and 24h it would be helpful to configure SEP in such a way to prevent the frequent access to the hard-disks. Do you have any idea how I could set-up the policies to ensure this?

Many thanks in advance for your help - unfortunately I was not able to contact the technical support as I am still on a trial-version.

Cheers

Steven

Hello,

I now tried the following things:

1) Different settings in the policies

2) Switching off each component of the Endpoint client one after another (e.g. Firewall)

Nothing helps, the harddrives still stay awake. Only when I force the Endpoint protection program to quit (via Taskmanager and ending the Service or after deinstallation of the program the disks are going into sleep-mode!

Any ideas? I cannot understand that other Small Business User (so the guys who don't want to run their disks all night) do not have that problem.

I would really like to buy the software - but not if I cannot solve such a simple problem. Is it somehow possible to get an pre-puchase support from Symantec?

Cheers

Steven

Hi,  I would try uninstalling each client feature from Add/Remove programs one at a time. Lets see what is driving that HDD activity from the client side. You should know that this HDD activity may just be from the client talking to the management server.

Note that SEP 12 SMB lacks many settings, so changing the communication setting is not an available option with this version.

Hi Thomas,

thanks for your help! As the Server is not running in production, the device has no clients with SEP Client installed. (only the SEP client + SEPM on the server).

It behaves like this:

a) Only SEPM on the server: Everything is fine (disks are going into sleep-mode)

b) SEPM + SEP client: No sleep.

Follwing up on your hint regarding the lack in function SEP 12 SMB. I downloaded the trial of SEP yesterday (so the full version), deinstalled SEP SBE and installed the full version SPEM ans SEP client (only on the server again).

--> Here everything is the same (no sleep when client installed)!

BUT: If I set the 'heartbeat' intervall longer (5h) the plates are going into sleep-mode :-)

I was then interessted if the 'heartbeat'-signal wakes up the server-data drives and tried the following: Setting the 'timeout' for sleep-mode of the harddisks to 2min (so switching of after 2min IDLE) and the heartbeat intervall to 5min. Results: The disks are going into sleep after 2min, but waking up after a few minutes. :-(

So, the big questions:

1) Is it the server, restarting the disks after getting the data from the clients, or is it the client itself:

I installed a client on on PC, conected to the server and w/o the client on the server. Here everything is OK --> seems that the client intself causes the problem

2) How to handle this? What exaclty is the client sending upon a hearbeat signal? The error occurs independent of the choosen mode (push or pull).

Does anyone know what to do, or how to configure to let the poor harddisks sleep upon a heartbeat signal?

Many thanks!

Cheers

Steven

Did you remove the features one at a time as suggested earlier? I would try and narow this down to a specific feature in SEP that may be causing the HDD spin-up..The only thing that comes to mind is I would check is that you have followed the best practices for installing the SEP client on a server OS. 

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH92440&locale=en_US