Server Management Suite

We are currently in the planning stage of moving from Altiris 7.0 to Altiris 7.1.  In this move we will be merging two different solutions, asset management for desktops and servers, and monitoring for servers.  These were on separately managed NS servers in the past but we plan on building a 3 tiered approach (1 master NS that 2 other NS servers report into).

Our question is, with the multiple NS setup, can any of these NS servers share the same database server or database instance?  If so, does anyone have any documentation on this approach?  Thank you.

The idea is that NS uses the TempDB extensively so should always have it's own instance but could share the same server. I will let the Intel SCS (OOB) database or a lightly used eXpress database share an instance but each NS should have it's own instance. You should be prepared to allocate lots of memory and have lots of disks or equivalent. So each db should have it's own spindle and each SQL log too, I believe. IOPS are the key, plently of them; there's a few articles on here about that.

Thank you that helped greatly.  I take it you may have already gone through migration?  I have 32 GB of memory and 8 CPU cores set up for the database servers and 16 GB of memory and 8 CPU set up for the NS servers.  Does this sound accurate to you?  We are going to be performing Asset Management and Server Monitoring.  We have about 7000 nodes in total if you count servers, desktops, and future expansion planned.  Thanks.

We are running Altiris Version No: 6.0.6074 (SP 3 + R13).

Deployment console 6.9 (Build 365) SP1.

SQL Server 2005:

Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio     9.00.3042.00
Microsoft Analysis Services Client Tools        2005.090.3042.00
Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) 2000.086.3959.00 (srv03_sp2_rtm.070216-1710)
Microsoft MSXML                                            2.6 3.0 4.0 6.0
Microsoft Internet Explorer                              6.0.3790.3959
Microsoft .NET Framework                             2.0.50727.3625
Operating System                                           5.2.3790

This is on a Windows 2003 R2 SP2 server.

The DBA wants to apply SP4. 

Are the "Altiris" and "eXpress" databases compatible with SP4?

TIA

SMP 7 isn't supported on SP4 to SQL 2005 so you won't be able to upgrade using that SQL Server. See the support matrix:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO9965

And DS is quite vague but I think should work:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO9454

Make sure you backup first and have backout plan for SP4.

Thanks Andy,  We actually have SMP running on another server.  They started over/fresh.  Altiris is just around for server patches (which will be going away in a month) and for desktop deployments until they figure that out in SMP.

Thanks much,  have a grand day!