Client Management Suite

I'm about to rollout agents in my environment and was wondering if there was a real benefit to using the 64bit Agents? This is a new deployment with no pre-existing agents. Seems to me that it would be easier to support one agent version, I haven’t found any issues in my testing using the 32bit agent on my x64 systems.

Thoughts?

in our environment we only pro populate the SMP agent and 2 sub agents.

The AexNSC.exe to deploy the SMP agent.

The Inventory Agent seems to be the same for x86 and 64.

The Deployment Solution agent is specific for x86 and 64. And we script that in to depend on the OS deployed.

The 64-bit Symantec Management Agent, like any 64-bit application, will be faster and capable of accessing more memory, though I wouldn't think you need more than 2GB RAM anyway.  One main importance is the ability to gather and report on 64-bit inventory data, including custom inventories on 64-bit systems.  For example, see the Warning at the beginning of this KB:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO54431

You can enable the 64-bit plug-ins and they'll find the correct homes based on policy target and resource applicability.

Does this answer your question?

I have enabled the 64 bit and 32 bit plugins already, I'm not sure how i would specify I want both 64 and 32 bit agents deployed. Does the SMP push the correct agent based on OS type?

The SMP deploys the correct agent based on OS type (x64 or x86)  automaticly, its then a question of plugins.