Client Management Suite

Hi All,

We are in the midst of upgrading to Client Management Suite 7 from version 6. Our server support team also wants to upgrade Symantec AntiVirus 10 (which is on a separate server) to Endpoint Protection 11. However, the team wants SEP 11 to now share servers with CMS.

I suggested this might be not be the best idea because it would add complexity to troubleshooting the CMS environment, as well as somewhat unknown (at this time) impact on performance.

Can I get feedback from some of you folks? I'd greatly appreciate your input.

Is your database on box or off (if it's off, great, if not, consider it)? How many clients do you service? Is there a separation of duties between client management and anti-virus teams?
What does your hardware look like?

One positive would be the SEP connector, which especially in v7, leverages Altiris to deploy and manage SEP clients.

 Yes, sorry, I should have included some environment info.

- Database off-box.
- CMS server hardware: 8 cores, 8 GB RAM
- previous anti-virus server managed clients and servers, and each team (server and client) managed their separate endpoints
- now, I believe that the server team wants to have two SEP servers, one for servers (~300) and one for clients (~3,500)
- the server team has acquired Server Mgmt Suite and has that on a different server

The connector can be used whether SEP is on a different server, correct? I'm OK with putting SEP on the CMS server if it really isn't a bad idea. But, I was thinking that since our client endpoints will keep growing, I want to avoid being pushed toward a 2nd CMS server if possible. I know that correctly managing and spreading out the various SMP task schedules is very important, and my initial fear is that adding SEP would add unknown (to me at this time) complexity and make administration more difficult.

Thank you very much for your guidance!

George
 

I would think it's an interesting choice to have two SEP Servers, and two Altiris servers (even if you make the move to combining one SEP server with CMS). In my opinion, you an easily create proper security roles and groups within SEP to have a single SEP server for clients and servers. That way you could keep the CMS and SMS Servers 'clean'.

I'm of the same opinion that splitting up the SEP environments to two servers is probably an unecessary duplication. Thanks for your comments. -George