Planning for an installation or upgrade of any software should be undertaken with preparation and planning in order for the deployment to be successful. On a number of occassions, I've seen users post that the particular software they have deployed is not functioning as it should for a variety of reasons.
These can be many from: incorrect software being loaded on an operating system that isn’t supported for instance; incorrect scoping of any hardware or VM resources to run this application, firewall ports not open etc.
This article simply highlights some of the mental checks that should be performed when planning for an installation, and is aimed primarily at people who are new to deploying software of any kind.
1. Get hold of ALL the supporting documentation you can!
Symantec has a good selection of supporting material for the products they currently have.
Everything is covered from deployment and implementation guides, to compatibility matrixes (hardware and software where applicable) as well as best practices. Getting more familiar with these documents goes a long way to ensuring that you’ve done the necessary homework before proceeding with any installation or upgrade, and these are crucial to assisting you, in some cases with step-by-step guidelines, to getting the installation/upgrade through correctly, and with very little hassle.
2. Understanding Licensing
Licensing can be very tricky, and most of the time IT engineers rely on someone giving them the correct licenses to run. I’ve been in situations where this hasn’t been the case and I received the incorrect versions (old instead of new), resulting on delayed completion of installations, or worse yet, projects.
My advice here is to contact a reseller in your country who knows exactly what you need. They’re in the best place to provide you with the correct licenses and quantities. Failing this, you’re able to register on PartnerNet and check these out for yourselves. But a good reseller or licensing expert is going to know precisely what to ask you to make sure they have the correct quantities and information to quote accordingly. There is an old adage in IT: Garbage in, garbage out! So make sure your information is correct when providing this.
3. Checking your software and hardware environment
The major headache coming through in the forums is due to people not understanding how software and hardware support is affected by new releases. As time moves on, software vendors eventually expire support for applications and hardware. Where your old version of Ghost Solution Suite ran on Windows 2003 Standard, that’s not the case anymore, and deploying a new version of GSS will see the installation or upgrade fail
"IT waits for no engineer" (to borrow a more famous phrase), and it is critical when planning an installation, or upgrade, to take this into account. It allows you to factor in new hardware to a budget proposal, or even consider upgrading to the latest version, while downgrading the license to allow you to install the last version of GSS that supported the software/hardware.
The same can be said for brand-new software, where versions of certain applications are not always immediately supported. Checking the relevant compatibility list to verify if you’re able to install this in order to monitor a new application for instance.
4. Speccing the Application Server
If you're able too, bigger is always better. The more RAM you are able to put into a server (based on physical capacity or budget), the better. This alleviates the obvious performance issues that MIGHT be experienced on a media server to a considerable extent.
Look at your server vendor's best practices when configuring your disks to see what the best option for performance is. Slower disks mean slower performance is most likely possible if you're using the server in conjunction with a local B2D.
With VM environments being mainstream now, they’re often the first place to deploy a new application. However, for strange reasons, not all vendors support a VM environment for their application, and it’s always best to verify that you can deploy an application on a VM host (VMware or Hyper-V). Furthermore, there might be a virtual appliance you can deploy which alleviates a number of issues such as OS licensing for Microsoft, or even incorrectly sizing the appliance. Make use of a virtual appliance where you can, especially if it allows for proper HA of an application as recoverability is going to be far quicker.
5. Reboots
Some applications still make use of agents that need to be installed or upgraded, often requiring a restart to effect any changes. Take note of this as unwanted downtime due to an automated restart can lead to business impact. If this is a new installation of software, I always put through courtesy Change Control so that it highlights sometime being done on the network, but if it is existing server software or agents, you need to cover any restarts.
6. Software Required
Finally, if any software is required, be it main server software or agents, make sure it is available and ready for use. If you have a *.OVA file for an appliance, import into your hypervisor of choice first to make sure it’s fine, and the same with any *.iso files. I have had numerous issues with corrupted files being downloaded and at installation, the process has failed either at the beginning or during the installation.
If your software makes use of Symantec LiveUpdate, run this a couple of times on the application server to make sure any subsequent patches were downloaded and installed.