Endpoint Protection

I have about 200 Windows 2008 x64 servers on SP2.   At present they have SAV CE v10.2.3 installed.  I know the officially 'supported' version of SAV for SP2 is 10.2.4, but what I want to know is whether 10.2.3 is functionally the same ie will it work fine with SP2 or suffer from deficiencies in performance/detections.

The release notes for the various maintenance releases make no mention of SP2 support which just confuses things further.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH102297&locale=en_US

Will be the same for all windows OS

For Windows 2008 SP2 its better to have 10.2.4 as it was recently supported by SEP aswell.

Windows 2008 has been supported for some time now..however 2008 R2 had few issues.

Thanks for your responses.  Are you therefore saying that I should be able to have confidence in 10.2.3 being compatible with SP2, while still being mindful of 10.2.4 being the preferred option?

I know it is quite off topic but maybe you should think about migrating to SEP 11? It offers much broader security than SAV and sooner or later SAV will cease to be supported.

I am planning to rollout SEP in 2011, which is why I don't need the distraction of having to upgrade SAV on the clients to 10.2.4 plus upgrading the SAV servers to 10.1.9, which I believe is required in order to properly manage that client version.

Yes you are right.

take your time :) 

So to return to the original question, 10.2.3 will work satisfactorily on SP2 although the preferred and supported option is 10.2.4?

so far , I have not seen any problems with SEP/SAV with related to service packs

the only problem was win2004 should be of SP4, thats it or else it wont get installed.

you mean windows 2000 sp4?

Regarding 10.2.4 clients - is it absolutely necessary to upgrade the management servers to v10.1.9 as well?  I'm currently on 10.1.8 - will that version manage 10.2.4 clients ok?  Is there any documentation around that please?

Also, if I do upgrade to 10.1.9, will that version manage all my 10.1.8 clients ok?

It is necessary to have the Management servers at the highest version than of the clients.

The SSC (Symantec System Center) Console will need to be the highest or the same version as that of the Symantec Server and the ones below that will need to be same or lesser in version.

As long as the hierarchy is maintained, you shouldn't have any problems.

If you upgrade to 10.1.9, the server will indeed be able to manage your 10.1.8 clients fine.

versions 10.1.5.5000 ~ 10.2.0, 10.1.6.6000 ~ 10.2.1,10.1.7.7000 ~ 10.2.2,10.1.8.8000 ~ 10.2.3, 10.1.9.9000 ~ 10.2.4

ok that's exactly what I needed to know, thank you.