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DS 7.1 what do you get?

  • 1.  DS 7.1 what do you get?

    Posted Apr 06, 2010 09:27 AM
    Hi,

    Does anyone know what you actually get with DS 7.1 in terms of functionality - when compared to DS 6.9? i.e. if you bought DS 7.1 only what would you actually get?

    In particular what Inventory and remote control capabilties does one get? While these functions were not the greatest in DS 6 they were important capabilities that were used by most - I'm hearing these are no longer available in DS 7.1 and you have to purchase CMS....

    Cheers

    Steve






  • 2.  RE: DS 7.1 what do you get?

    Posted Apr 07, 2010 07:51 PM

    It sounds like you're on a beer budget with champagne tastes.  Buy CMS.  It has the features you want (inventory, intelligent software delivery, patching, remote control, complete management) that DS doesn't have.  DS is really a limited tool with deployment, simple tasks/jobs, and a limited remote control agent.



  • 3.  RE: DS 7.1 what do you get?

    Posted Apr 08, 2010 08:21 AM
    I'm pretty sure you have to buy CMS to get DS7.1 (correct me if I am wrong).  DS7.x is no longer a stand alone product like DS6.x was.  It was designed to be an add-on to NS.


  • 4.  RE: DS 7.1 what do you get?

    Posted Apr 08, 2010 09:26 AM

    I don't know why I didn't make that more clear.  DS 7.x will never be available standalone.  And I think part of the reason for that, aside from the technical, is that folks would try to "get by" with DS alone when they really shouldn't.



  • 5.  RE: DS 7.1 what do you get?

    Posted Apr 08, 2010 02:05 PM
    When you are talking about DS 7x you are really taking about CMS or NS 7 now.

    I am not all that thrilled with DS 7, but the additional features in CMS are much more than DS 6.9. Carbon Copy was replaced with pcAnywhere which is a big improvement. There are additional inventory reports as well as some of the older reports.


  • 6.  RE: DS 7.1 what do you get?

    Posted Apr 12, 2010 06:17 AM
    I'm a specialist business  partner focussed solely on the Altiris/Endpoint management products and have been for many years so I'm not looking to buy. And I do know what products are available and what they can do.

    DS has been the principal Altiris product for many years and is delivered in several different guises by some pretty well known organisations. For a very large number of CMS customers it is the only product from the suite they actually use - and is always the one they want to keep when they finally decide to look for something else. It is far from being a limited tool, and while there were more sophisticated variants of some of the functionality available elsewhere it beats these because it delivers what customers really want - a set of good hugely beneficial capabilities that are straightforward and work and that are, above all all, intuitive and easy to use and manage.

    The standalone version of 7.x is available in the price list today and will continue to be in the price list as far as I can gather from product marketing. Being roughly half the price of CMS and delivering what it did it was a very attractive initial solution for customers. Many a CMS, AMS, TMS etc customer developed from an initial purchase (or supply) of DS, while for the huge number of small organisations out there in the world it was an excellent basic remote management solution.

    Having asked elsewhere - I believe that if you buy DS today the 7.1 version includes no remote control or inventory (other than the Altiris agent basic inventory). The software delivery task is also not available, though of course the file copy and execute is available (which was pretty much all the sowftare delivery in DS did anyway) so you can still deliver software - just not as a specific task.

    While the software can take full advantage of the 7 platform and architecture, and the task server is able to offer a large number of  additional tasks, if purchased, and does this without significantly detracting from the ease of use and manageability - I do wonder how customers will react to these changes. I

    'd be interested to hear whether customers were expecting to get improved remote control with DS and how they view it's removal, and whether the new features deliver benefits that they feel more than compensate for this. I know the answers from my customers.... 

    I do think folks need to be aware of the real differences between the 6 and 7 products, both the plusses and the potential minuses so that expectations are set correctly before they upgrade...

    Steve


  • 7.  RE: DS 7.1 what do you get?

    Posted Apr 20, 2010 10:48 AM

    I manage ten DS 6.9 sp2 servers for a school district.  These servers feed about 26,000 computers, and we're about to add another 2000 or so more computers with the opening of 3 new campuses this summer.  I was looking into upgrading to DS 7.1 now that it has PXE, but after hearing how much stuff is missing or completely screwed up, I consider myself lucky that they're still supporting 6.9 with sp4 (I'm about to start testing sp4). 

    Seriously - taking away remote control?  Sure, ds remote is buggy, but we use it all day every day.  OK, so NS has pcanywhere.  I was totally unimpressed by carbon copy, and was even less impressed by the version of pcanywhere we used to run here in the district (only 1-2 vers old) before we got DS remote.  What's the point of having a remote deployment solution if you can't easily remotely manage the machines afterwards?  Yes, there are other tools out there on the market (personally i love dameware) but if a remote control tool has always been part of a product, why would you remove it?  my only complaint with ds remote in 6.9 is that you can't cut/paste in/out of the window.

    Conditions - I use these on loads of my jobs.  It really goes well with HII - I can have ONE build job to cover literaly 30 different models (and all their variants) with one image, so the techs in the field (and the service desk) don't have to weed through a massive list of build jobs or potentially put the wrong build job on a machine.  For example - some of our machines have TV Tuners in them, so I have the build job check to see if the tuner is there in the hardware list and then install the appropriate tuner software, but if no tuner is found, skip that step and move on to the next one.  Without conditions, I'm going to have to make 30 different build jobs, which somewhat negates the purpose of having HII.  Yes, I know I will still use the same base image, but from the technician's perspective, the huge leap forward we made last year by implementing HII just got taken away from them. 

    from other bits i'm reading, it seems aclient/dagent reports less, and pxe provisioning works almost independently from the DS itself, as if integration was deliberately broken (pxe server now names teh machines one thing, then when it boots to production it gets named something else in the console?  boy that breaks a whole list of stuff...

    our DS system really can (and nearly does) stand alone, completely independant from our three NS servers.  The NS (6.x) is being used for inventory, app control, patch mgmt, and a few other things such as deploying our new AV product.  Really the only connection the DSs have with the NSs is that the NS servers happen to be our image servers, but if the NSs were to go away, I could just move my images somewhere else and nobody would know any different.  They both use the same SQL server cluster as well, but again, the DS doesn't care what the NS does, as they each have their own database. 

    I can see the benefits of integrating the two platforms, but even in an environment the size of ours, it's not necessary, and don't feel they should require it.  In an environment our size, it would be a seriously MASSIVE undertaking, and i can see lots of downtime. 

    Maybe by 7.5 they will have a more feasible migration path and will have replaced the features they took out.  I can respect the fact that they want the core to be solid before they start tacking on extras, but if it's not AT LEAST as good and feature-complete as the previous version, then IMHO it should not even be a RC version - it should be labeled as beta. 

    I can't see us upgrading to ds 7.x any time soon unless something big changes to convince me otherwise.  We might upgrade NS to 7, but won't be using the DS part(s) of it. 


  • 8.  RE: DS 7.1 what do you get?

    Posted Apr 20, 2010 10:58 AM

    so... all that said, why should i upgrade to 7.1?  I was originally considering an upgrade to 7.1 instead of going from 6.9 sp2 to sp4, solely for bugfixes.  but if i'm going to lose an entire year's worth of work by having to start over from scratch?  yeah, no thanks.  a spiffy looking silverlight console isn't worth it to me.  and it seems to me if you're going to go to all the trouble to make a WEB console, then you should spend a little more time making it platform-independent.  There's plenty of mac and linux users out there who can't/won't run IE.  And with IE's track history concerning security, why would any self-respecting admin WANT to run IE?


  • 9.  RE: DS 7.1 what do you get?

    Posted Apr 20, 2010 12:37 PM
    The whole idea of them moving to Silverlight was to give faster performance and to give browser independence so you aren't locked into using IE.  This now also opens up the ability to access Altiris with Linux via Moonlight (open source version of Silverlight)

    I think a lot of the need for upgrading is for users who utilize both NS solutions and DS -- there are features that just don't work in the NS6 platform and with Symantec's main focus being on the 7 platform, those feature requests and bug fix requests are going to idlely sit by while the developers churn out service packs, etc. for the v7 products.

    We run DS 6.9 SP4 here and use Inventory Solution, Asset Management and Help Desk 6.5.  We want to be able to do a lot more customizations to our help desk implementation that Service Desk will allow us to do much, much more easily but to do that, unfortunately, everything else is going to have to be upgraded too.  (Yes, I'm aware that DS 6.9 can run in tandem with NS7, but we'll eventually move to 7.1)


  • 10.  RE: DS 7.1 what do you get?

    Posted Jun 04, 2010 08:40 AM
    Hello,

    And other difference ... there aren't PXE MAC Filter in DS 7.x ... so if you have the option for answer unknown clients (so you can deploy an image to it) then you can cause a lot of trouble if there are computers not managed by DS in the network ... imagine the director laptop connects to the network and its content is being erased by a deployment ;-(

    So, is it possible to have DS 6.9 SP4 for deploying images and the new CMS 7.x for inventory and deploy of software (for example, virtual layer). Or the method of deploying software is using DS 7.x?

    I hope some one has any clues about this ...

    Thanks.