is there a populate for 7?

These used to be available from the vairous Altiris 6 Resource Kits which were available thru MF and sometimes technical site visits.

I have an open ticket with my AE and will update as soon as I hear something back.

Article ID: 31730

Possible stress testing methods for the NS

The Altiris Resource Kit comes with some good testing tools, and this article provides some examples as to how to use SIMAgent, an Altiris Agent load simulation utility.  There are two versions of SIMAgent available, one for standard HTTP and one for SSL-enabled locations.

Scripting the replication of inventory files from the agents by simply calling the aexnsinvcollector with the switch which tells it to ignore the .bak files, will allow you to test agent to server inventory transmission.  SIMAgent can be scripted to send different inventories.

To test server activity with history, script the SIMAgent so that changes to (machine names and guids and dates) are made to multitudes of .nsi files and then load them on a server to have inventory.

Once the package server component is up and running within a virtual agent, it attempts to download the raw packages assigned to it but this is as far as it gets.  To automate package downloads, you can use this script.  This will allow you to run download capacity tests.

To test Inventory Forwarding capacity, build populated DB's with modified .nse files or the SIMAgent and then use the same or slightly modified DB's (each on a separate server) to send to the next level NS.  Use the Forwarding NS that will manage the largest amount of resources, as well as its direct Reporting NS and then that servers direct Reporting NS, etc.

To use the SSL enabled version, you must check the 'Use Secure Http' option on the Simulation tab of the Configuration page.  Please note that all other normal procedures for enabling SSL in your Notification Server must be completed prior to using this utility, if you want to test SSL functionality.  Lastly, the SSL enabled version requires .NET 2.0 to be installed on the machine running SIMAgent.

Please also note that these utilities are considered unsupported at this time.

The article cnpalmer references is available here: AKB 31730.  The file downloads are located in the right side-bar.