Client Management Suite

Hi,

I'm just trying to get an idea of the best / preferred ways to replicate packages and source files for NS (will be 7.0 SP1 in this case.) packages and DS (6.9 SP1) in a distributed environment,  and what the pro's and con's are?  we have a couple of main sites and some intertstate and overseas offices which are generally pretty well connected running a couple of thousand clients.

I know most people use the native NS replication and setup package servers but I also know some people are using DFS-R etc (although I think this might be unsupported by Altiris? -at least for 6.x?)

will be implementing NS7.0 and just trying to work out the best way to go..

thanks in advance!

Use native replication. Not only is it supported, but I think you can better integrate or aborb existing pieces (file servers, or systems with appropriate disk space and memory), at a substantially less cost than implementing a DFS system.

My old company tried using DFS, and it was to, put it mildly, an abject failure. DFS (granted it was Windows 2000 based, multi-master) was a crapshoot at best, and when it died so did software delivery.

Also, I haven't heard of Altiris\Symantec changing their position on supporting DFS. I also recall (perhaps not totally correctly) intial support for Cisco's ACNS product, but that quietly went away at some point. I wouldn't discount the need for support by a vendor when considering implementing a management solution.

We have over 100 package servers in North America alone served from our main NS here at headquarters, and most of them are on relatively slow (< 512Kb/s) WAN links.  Using HTTP-based distribution allows for byte-level resuming as well in case the transfer does fail (if you use UNC sources, you get file-level resuming).  It sometimes takes a while for all the packages to get out there (due to additional %-based throttling we enable) but they do get there.  If you already have DFS, you can leverage it by setting the package source to be the \\dfs\share\path, or inject items into the DFS (I think) by setting a custom destination on the PS using \\%COMPUTERNAME%\DFS\Share\Path as the destination.  As I said, we rely completely on the built-in replication and it has only given us a few problems (specifcally with files with .map extensions, but I think those issues have been fixed in later Package Server Agent builds).

Thanks guys - I think I'll be sticking with native replication then..   from taking a look a bit deeper it seems to be more people using DS using DFS seemingly pretty much to allow them to be able to maintain uniform source paths across sites which is fair enough I guess but not really too relevant for us right now...

Thanks!

:-)