Client Management Suite

 View Only

Two ways to upgrade the agents in Migrating to NS7 

Apr 06, 2009 09:50 AM

When you are ready to migrate to NS7 there are two options or ways to make sure all of your NS6 agents upgrade correctly to NS7. I'll discuss breifly two options and which one I believe is the cleaner and easier method.
When discussing the update of the client agents I ask one question:  Do you have the DS Agent installed on the client?  In the second way to upgrade the agent I'll discuss why I ask that question.
The recommend way to upgrade your agents from Symantec is to first enable the unistall agent policies for each subagent (not the main Altiris Agent) on the NS6 box and wait for the clients to check in, get the new policies and then remove those subagents. While those agents uninstall, make sure the Upgrade Agent policiy is enabled on the NS7 system.  Once the subagents are uninstalled, Inventory, Software Delivery, Patch, etc, then on the NS6 box change the Altiris Agent policy to point to an alternate NS, being the NS7 system.   Now the clients will check in and upgrade to NS7.  Then you can roll out the subagents for your NS7 system.
As you can see this process can take some time for your clients to check in and upgrade.  How long do you want to wait for your agents to migrate?  Are you under time constraints?  How do you know everything cleanly uninstalls/upgrades?

Going back to my question, I found during my Early Adopter Implementations it was quicker and cleaner to utilize the DS to perform this upgrade.  If I have the DS Agent on my clients I can create a job with two tasks to perform the upgrade.  This guarntees a fresh install and clean install of the Altiris agent and all of its subagents.
My Job was made up of these two tasks:
1.  aexagentutil /clean (To competely remove and clean the install of the NS7 agent)
2. scripted install of the NS7 agent pointing it to the correct notification server 7 box.

I ran this job on all of my machines without any problems and with a clean migration/upgrade to NS7.

Questions or comments, drop me a note.

Statistics
0 Favorited
0 Views
0 Files
0 Shares
0 Downloads

Tags and Keywords

Comments

Apr 15, 2009 10:09 PM

Thanks didn't know that.  Thanks for sharing the tip

Apr 06, 2009 09:33 PM

There's one important thing to keep in mind when running aexagentutil.exe /clean.  If you are running Symantec Endpoint Protection and deployed your clients using the SEP Integration Component then running aexagentutil.exe /clean will also uninstall your SEP clients.  We avoided uninstalling the agent for this reason, as we really did not want to re-install SEP on all of our managed endpoints.

Related Entries and Links

No Related Resource entered.