Deployment Solution

Hello all,

I am pretty new to Altiris, I have used before but now never have to set it up from scratch.
Hopefully someone could give me some lights on this.

We currently have got 7 sites. We have got one altiris server in our headoffice.
Am I suppose to installed the whole deployment solution in the new location and sync with existing one or how.

Thank you so much for your assistance.

There are a couple of ways to do this. We have 9 sites and only have one DS and NS. What we do is copy all of the images and software packages locally to each of the sites and based on the subnet it maps a drive or mounts the volume (in linux) and pulls the packages from the local server.

We are a school system. We have about 35 sites, with a DS server covering a "cone" of a HS and the schools which supply it, Jr Highs and elementaries. This server also takes care of PXE and all images for that group. We are Novell authenticated and don't need to worry about active directory. Really, the determining factors should be the speed of your network and number of client machines connecting. We set up these when we had T1 to each HS, then the elementaries and Jr HIghs were migrated into them by just pointing the aclient from the old school to the new one and changing over the pxe helper address on the respective switch(es) when they got their high speed lines. Each DS server handles about 1000 client machines. Each server has its own MSDE database.

Thank you bhawver and darmitage for your reply. I really appreciated it.

We are running Active Directory and have a domain controller on each sites.
So, according to your reply darmitage, each DS will taking care of its images and packages. So there won't be any syncronization between DS servers?

I run AD and and only use one NS and DS. I just DFS my images and other items that I don't want accessed across the WAN. I build in my scripts logic that determines the IP and based on the IP maps a drive to the correct server.

Correct. In my organization, as of now, each DS server is independent. Our installation is about as simple as possible. All HP, leasing one model desktop and one model laptop per year(hence no HII), and no Active directory, single XP license (still all XP), and almost no scripting.

Thank you for your reply guys.

bhawver, we have been using one DS for couple months now. We were using RIS before. But It has caused issue as some sites have got poor connections to the head office.

Therefore, we are going to roll out couple more DS on site. I think for now, I will follow your practice darmitage as it is really simple.