Washington DC Endpoint Management User Group

So we are starting to see an interesting issue now that almost 90% of our environment is virtualized. When the inventory job kicks off everything gets hammared and slows down. Is there any way to randomize when the inventory runs so the VMs do not get hit all at the same time? The ESX servers are very mad at me.

create seperate collections - top 100,server 100-299, server 300-399

what i have done before

This is what you are looking for...

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/downloads/how-create-randomized-inventory-vdi-environments

Remeber to Vote ;-)

Abstract: The following process provides the necessary steps to create customized inventory tasks which will execute on a random schedule based upon usage of the AeXRunControl.exe from the Altiris 6.x platform. This is especially useful for VDI environments that cannot run tasks across hosted sessions all at the same scheduled time as that generates heavy I/O for both CPU & disk performance on the host. 

NOTE: You will need a copy of AeXRunControl.exe distributed to a location on each client for use in the script. You shoud also familiarize yourself with the usage of the .EXE and the vaiorus command line switches available for use.

Environment:  Symantec Management Platform 7.1 SP1 

I was about to create one too.

I did have a chat with our rep about this issue and it is something they are aware of and are working on a solution. However he did not have a timeline for me. So this is something we can look foward to in a future release.

I have had talks with several PM's and this is a deficiency in the product set as it stands now. They do support the usage & document in the 7.x platform even though the .EXE is from a 6.x installtion.

This was the most unique way they had seen it accomplished as almost everyone uses different filters of computers and cloned policies.

I pulled together this SQL to put my vms in 4 groups to try to split up the inventory load. Here is my example. You just have to change the ntile value to the number of groups you want and then change the Groups filter. In this example it shows all VMs in group 1.

WITH VMSplits AS
(
 SELECT
  cmp.Guid
  ,cmp.Domain
  ,cmp.Name
  ,HW.Manufacturer AS [System Manufacturer]
  ,ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY Guid) as 'RowNumber'
  ,ntile(4) OVER (ORDER BY Guid) as [Groups]
 FROM vComputer as CMP
   LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.vHWComputerSystem AS HW ON cmp.Guid = HW._ResourceGuid
 Where hw.Manufacturer like 'VMWare%'
)
Select
*
From VMSplits
Where Groups = 1