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Originally published at Internet.comThe Altiris Server Management Suite is a collection of the vendor's tools that together facilitate the lifecycle management process especially for enterprise servers. Included within the suite are individual components for the initial deployment and provisioning of servers; patch and application management; health monitoring and alerting features.
Implementing the suite first requires the installation of the vendor's Altiris Notification Server, which requires a Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003 machine. Servers that can be managed by the platform include Windows, Linux (Red Hat, SuSE), and multiple UNIX flavors (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX); though the vendor does note that not all Server Management Suite capabilities are supported on all of the supported UNIX/Linux servers.
Individual components of the suite include: Monitor Solution for Servers, Recovery Solution for Servers, Web Administrator Solution for Windows, Application Management Solution, Deployment Solution for Servers, Inventory Solution for Servers, Patch Management Solution, Site Monitor Solution, and Software Delivery Solution for Servers.
The vendor describes the platform as covering three tiers or levels of server management tasks.
On the first level are the base initialization and provisioning tasks, including bare metal O/S, application, and configuration of network settings; software delivery capabilities allowing for the targeting of specific servers based on hardware or software configurations; patch management operations that leverage an information repository including both available patches and open vulnerabilities ranked by severity; and state management and inventory capabilities allowing for the tracking of current server states and hardware/software configurations.
The second level of server management capabilities consists of both automated recovery tools-allowing, for example, the rollback of a server to a previous state in the event of a faulty patch deployment; and the specific Web Administrator Solution for Windows, which allows you to view statistics and operational parameters in real time and facilitates trouble shooting via built-in tools such as traceroute or port scans and the ability to remotely control 3rd party tools.
Finally, the third level of server management consists of the vendor's Server Monitoring tools; with features including Web based performance reporting and alert management (either through E-mail or the Alert Manager console).
The latest enhancement to the Server Management Suite is the release of the updated Deployment Solution component. The new Deployement Solution release includes support for WinPE and Linux as pre-boot environments; role and scope-based security rights integrated with Active Directory groups and key-based client/server authentication; scripted OS installs for VMware ESX; and a new agent for Solaris Sparc 8 and 9, among other improvements.
Server Management Suite is available now. Visit the Altiris Web site for further information.Author: EITPlanet Staff
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