I have a customer that has some problems with one of three child servers, with some serious memory consumption there going from 2 GiB for TaskManagement, ~2.5GiB for AeXSvc and anything above that (sometimes 5GiB+) for the Altiris-NS-Agent.

This is causing some serious troubles obviously, as the CPU are all clogged up (95~100% on 24 real cores). So first we reduced the overall impact by limiting the number of CPU's the process is allowed to on (using advanced setting and processor affinity mask).

And then we took a few dumps to see how the memory gets up to 4GiB or more...

I'll detail the WinDbg commands (and how to load mscorewks via sos.dll) but here's the over view running DumpHeap -stat at various stages.

Note! Here are the field names used below in order, Memory address, object count, total size, object type. The listing is sorted by size ascending. So the interesting data is at the end.

...

To put it mildly, the Altiris SMP 7.1 MP1's DS suite is not looking good. And if you have a working DS 6.x, do not migrate to DS 7.x!

Especially if you came from a previous DS 6.x back ground. The pxe now named SBS is flakier than the combo's at Long John Silvers, and the UI design is as simple as solving the Super Strings theory.

So the facts:

PXE works, but it does strange stuff at times and the only way to resume functions when a machine refused to function within PXE is to Stop all SBS services and clear out the Task Handler folder.

PC join domain, naming. Mother of all nightmares. How this could be such a complicated set of dance moves is shocking. This is an Enterprise product?

PC cant be re-named in WinPE, so the randomized name gets used as the PC name after the jobs at times. 

Here is to a good productive day on resolving the PC join domain after imaging issues. But it's future is bleak based on what we are seeing...

This week, diving deeper in to the functional side of DS with some Windows 7 testing along with software deploying.

So we all know the new DS is different, but I never knew it was going to be this different. And Different is not good at all from an DS Administrator's perspective. So here is a low down.

• Software manager is a mess. Maybe from an accountant's side this may be decent, but for an admin, it bestows more work, more clutter, and a interface that serves hardly any benefits. Bottom line, Too many steps to create a job, and not any benefits over the existing platform.

• New PXE has some issues. The SBS corrupts at times causing machines to give the Device is Not Capable errors. Again, another solution to a problem that didnt exist in DS 6.x or any of the competitor's products. 

• Software delivery is badly executed as well. There are Tasks and...

The white board sessions seems to get longer, and the endless syntex errors are just a blur dulled by time.

But we are making steady progress. Altiris 7 doesnt suck like everyone said it would, and other than a very crappy(Personal opinion) console design, everything is pretty smooth.

Things accomplished:

Hardware independent image done, took 3 days, completely modular.

Base Software installed through Unattended.xml. Again modular based on what we copy in to the partitioned image duing WinPE.

Agent installer logic build into WinPE with variables to install agent to the correct Parent/Child Server.

PCAnywhere tested and working perfectly.

SQL sort issues kind of resolved- gotta specify ASC and DESC on a few servers. So we just specified for all at the top and let hierchy replicate them down.

The Grocery List for next week:

Populate Software manager for SVS, Desktop Deploymen.

Win...