Client Management Suite

Hi all...I would like to apply SP2 to our environment, currently at 7.1 SP1. All of my searches on SP2 have turned up negative experiences with the application of this service pack. This has made me extremely cautious about this upgrade -particularly because everything must be updated to the same level at once. Has anyone had a good experience?  Please share your experiences, good, bad, or other. If you had a bad experience, have you been able to resolve the issues and what did it take?

I do not plan on updating ServiceDesk.

We have Asset Management Suite, Client Management Suite, and Server Management Suite. 35 Site Servers; no hierarchy.

Thanks for any information you can share!

There were some hiccups with third-party solutions (Arellia, ITA) early in the release, but for the most part these have settled out.  We have many customers that we've moved to SP2.  Do your research, ensure you follow best practices for the upgrade. (http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH177513 is a big one.)  Keep in mind now that if you patch pcAnywhere to the latest release, you're also going to lose out on pcAnywhere Access Server, if you use it.

I just did it a couple of weeks ago.  We also run AMS, CMS, and SMS.  Didn't have a single issue with the upgrade.  I did have an issue with SIM's preflight checks, that took like a month and a half for support to solve, but once we got past that -  it was flawless.

Thanks for sharing feedback. I had been feeling hinky about the upgrade having not seen positive experiences related. This helps a lot!

I am currently in the midst of one of the bad experiences.  This has been going on for weeks now.   Cannot get SP2 to complete.  Meanwhile, the problems I was hoping to fix with SP2 have been added to.  The installer seems to be attempting uninstall some things that are not actually installed and failing.  Support not taking this very seriously.

Once you are done with the core SP2 install, add in the 2 updates that will be listed in SIM then contact support for the latest Vx Rollup release currently at V3 (V4 should be released in May).

Would you consider that SOP to install every rollup?  Are they released on a regular schedule?  Is there some KB I can subscribe to in order to find out when they are released?

The only way to get the rollup is to contact support. It is not published or available thru SIM. They are released almost monthly, however V3 was released at the very end of March and V4 will be released the 1st week of May so April was skipped. I suppose it depends on timing.

Symantec will tell you only to install the rollup if you are experiencing an issue that is fixed with the rollup per the release notes.

I will tell you that I install each rollup after testing it in my lab as I have come across things I've experienced as part of SP2 or a previous applied rollup that may not be specifically addressed in the release notes but is known to fix a current issue. I am currently on SP2V2 as it included platform & agent fixes I requried.

For example. I have an open ticket with Dev & Engineering regarding the automatic agent upgrade for 64 bit resources (Windows 7 in my case). On some machines the agent will fail to upgrade and will end up without any agent installed. What occurs is a related symantec agent servie is getting restarted during the upgrade process and causes the upgrade to fail. It does not happen all the time and I've supplied 7 FULL procmon traces of failed upgrade attempts during the upgrade process.

I have been told that the code in the V3 release is much more "solid" code for the agent and that it performs a bit better on resource usage and may resolve my upgrade issue. I also know there is a code change for the V4 agent that also addresses a second open ticket I have for a known issue with the SMFDiscovery process on 64 bit OS's. Looking thru the preliminary rel notes for V4 I don't see these 2 items listed but have been told the updated agent should fix them.

I am skipping V3 and waiting for V4 because of the on-going rollout of the SP2V2 upgrade we're still performing (I did not want to introduce a new agent mid-upgrade process).

This is why I apply the rollup, because issues not listed specifically in the release notes may be fixed by the patch.

Also, each rollup is cumulative so you only need to apply the latest version and you recieve all fixes from all previous versions.

I'd like to update.   Support was able to resolve my update issues.  I now have SP2 plus the version 3 rollup.  Everything is working great.  All of our problems have been fixed as well as some ongoing annoyances we've had with Software management. (Extremely slow due to Silverlight).

Now that the situation has improved, I'm glad we are at SP2.  I wish the installer were more robust as to handle more of the situations that can arrise during the uprade.  It also should either complete successfully or back out completely.  As for support,  they did work to fix the issue but due to length of the resolve, we had to pause several times to allow other projects to proceed.   If you are going to undertake SP2, allow a few days to complete the install and verify that everything is performing as desired.   I would not undertake this as a "simple" update that can be squeezed in quickly.

So I'm finding that I do have some outstanding issues with SP2.  It looks like there were some changes to role based security.  Things aren't functioning correctly for some of the software deployment roles I've created.  Yay.

support has to supply these rollups?

Wonder what they fix as most of the issues we have are long unresolved issues dating back since the start of the 7.x product.

We have been running SP2 since Dec with no serious issues.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH180832

Thanks for all of the great feedback in this thread. Waiting for a "light" patch month to perform the upgrade --could be a long wait. :)