Instead of deleting them, retire the asset. Under purging maintenance select retired instead of delete and you will keep your asset history and not delete everything aobut taht asset along with freeing up your license

Jonathan Jesse
Director of Training
ITS Partners

That will work for all products with one exception. It was the case once upon a time that Patch Management still counted retired assets as taking a license.

I hope that's changed, but if I remember right it was mentioned during a webcast for the 9.2 version of patch management solution so maybe not.

I do remember Altiris support could help out with that issue if it presented a problem.

Sorry for the late thought, but what about uninstalling the agent? Create a collection of those that you want to uninstall and then set it up through the "No Reboot - Carbon Copy Agent Uninstall" job under the Configuration > Solution Settings > Incident Management > carbon Copy.

Just a thought. May not work if you take it off the network before hand though...

Be very careful using the 'retire' feature because if you are using those machines again, the mac address is stored in altiris and it will not receive new client configs even if the machine name is changed because Altiris sees it as retired. A good way to keep data but purge it from your 'active' database is to create a 'retired' database and create a stored procedure you can run before you do purging maintenance. This way your 'active' database isn't sifting through all the data you may or may not need later.