Tag Archives: symantec

Symantec

Facts About Combine License Workshop

Reposted from here.

The License Workshop can be used to download the licenses for all Altiris products registered to your company (or group of companies), or to combine and download licenses for a particular Altiris product.

Combining Licenses

When two or more license certificates for the same product are combines into a single certificate, the new maintenance date that is embedded in the certificate is the lesser of all the dates.

For example, if you combine 100 nodes of a product with a maintenance date ending 01-01-2007 with 100 nodes with a maintenance date ending 06-01-2007, the new certificate will be created for 200 nodes with a maintenance expiration date of 01-01-2007.

When the maintenance expires on the combined license you can use the License Management Portal to received your licenses in a new configuration, or you may contact your Sales Representative to have your maintenance dates co termed to a single date.

During the co terming process, the maintenance expiration dates on combines licenses will also be combined. All combined licenses will assume the shorted maintenance duration available from the individual licenses.

Example, if you combine two license files, one having 6 months remaining and the other having 8 months remaining, the maintenance window of the combined license files will have a maintenance duration of 6 months) At the end of the combined licenses term, you will have the opportunity to use the remaining two months of support in the example by installing the individual license key containing the remaining maintenance.

The Maintenance assigned to the license is the lesser of the Maintenance dates assigned of the licenses being combines or 7 months from the day the license is being created. When licenses are, the .txt files must have at least 7 months of Maintenance assigned or the license will timed out.

Using the License Workshop

* Option 1
Allow you to download the licenses for all your Altiris products at once. When choosing this option, the system will automatically combine licenses for products you own into as few license files as possible, placing the licenses into a single ZIP file that is downloaded to your computer.

The licenses downloaded will be for all Altiris companies associated with your Symantec account, and is not affected by the check boxes show in the Option 2 area of the page.

* Option 2 Download Selected Licenses (Combined)

When more than one Altiris company is associated with your account, a list of those companies will be displayed on the page. New license purchase with your Symantec account will be listed under the name ‘ New Licenses’. (There may be multiple companies listed due to grouping that was done in Altiris, and also grouping that was done when Altiris information was moved to Symantec)

Using the check boxes nest to the company names, choose the companies associated with the products to be combined (to keep things simple, you may wish to leave all companies selected) . As you change the selected companies, the list of products will change to show all combinable products for the selected companies. If there is only one company associated with your account, you will not be able to deselect it.)

Next select a product to combine from the list of products- only combinable products with active support will be listed. Please not that only individual products are combinable- suites of products are not.

Finally, combine the desired licenses using the arrows, and click on the download button to obtain a single combined license file for the selected product (the maintenance co termination rules noted above will apply.)

Symantec

Manually Installing the Symantec Management Agent

While logged on to the machine you want to install the agent, locate the installation file.  One place to get the file is to drill down into the Symantec Management Platform (SMP) server NSCap share that is created when the server is installed.  In the example below, <SMP Server> is the hostname or FQDN of your SMP server.

\\<SMP Server>\NSCap\bin\Win32\X86\NS Client Package\AeXNSC.exe

Copy the file to your machine and then open a command prompt to execute AeXNSC.exe.  Run the command prompt as administrator on Windows 2008 and Windows 7.  In my example here, I placed it in C:\Temp because I will not actually need the file after the installation is done.

Determine where you want the installation path to be.  If this is going to be a package server, make sure that the location is somewhere you’ll have plenty of disk space for packages.  In my example, I’m using the default.  You can substitute anything else you want, like “E:\ServerApps\Altiris” or whatever… You’ll also need to inform the installer what the FQDN of the SMP server is.  The sytax is like this:

AeXNSC.exe /install /path=<My installation path> /ns=<SMP FQDN>

The installer then decompresses to start installing.  It went by too fast for me to catch a screenshot of it.  It looks very similar to other installers that count to 100.  Once the installer finishes running you’ll get a success prompt that will look similar to this one.  If you’re maticulous, you can delete AeXNSC.exe that you used to start the installation.

You can monitor the installation by drilling down to the installation path. 

Optionally, you can also launch AeXAgentActivate.exe to monitor a little closer.

Click on the settings link  to look at the Agent Settings.

You’ll see that the SMP server is shown with what we told it with the /ns switch.   Within 15 minutes, it will update with the SMP server, get applicable policies and proceed to be managed.  If you’re kind of impatient, you can click the Update button to try and force it to update with the SMP server and keep things moving along.  This works kind of like when a pedestrian would press the walk button at an intersection.  After the first update, the button is more responsive to policy updates.  As new plug-ins are installed, the agent will restart and close these windows.  That’s a good sign that things are progressing along as intended.

Symantec

Manually uninstalling Symantec Management Agent

Run through the following steps to fully remove the Symantec Management Agent (A.K.A. Altiris Agent).

Run the following command line to remove the Altiris Agent using AeXAgentUtil.exe located by default at

C:\Program Files\Altiris\Altiris Agent\

If you are running this on Windows 2008 or Windows 7, be sure to run this in a command window running as administrator.

AeXAgentUtil.exe /clean

This will remove all plug-ins (agents) and from the computer.  A reboot of the computer is required if you plan to reinstalling agents.

Optional: Delete Program files at :

C:\Program Files\Altiris\Altiris Agent

The utility cannot clean itself out while it was running.

You should also go and delete this resource on the SMP console.  It frees up a license and keeps things tidy.

Microsoft

Optimizing SQL

Creating a maintenance plan in SQL Server 2005 or 2008 to optimize database performance

Article: HOWTO8589

Question
How can I create a maintenance plan in SQL Server 2005 or 2008 to optimize database performance?
Answer
A SQL maintenance plan for rebuilding indexes and setting the index free space percentage to 10% within the Symantec/Altiris databases should be scheduled to run at least monthly (preferably weekly). This maintenance plan should also be configured to update column statistics (index statistics are updated during the index rebuild process). It is recommended that this plan be scheduled to run at a time when database utilization by the Symantec applications is at its lowest. This could be on a Sunday during the day or a during a scheduled maintenance cycle, etc.

To build the SQL Maintenance plan for SQL 2005/2008:

  1. Make sure that the SQL Server Agent service is running.
  2. Open SQL Server Management Studio.
  3. Expand the Management folder.
  4. Right-click on Maintenance Plans and select Maintenance Plan Wizard.
  5. When the SQL Server Maintenance Plan Wizard info page opens up; click Next.
  6. Give the maintenance plan a name such as “Rebuild Indexes for Altiris Databases”.
  7. Leave the default option set to Single schedule for the entire plan… Click the Change button to put in the schedule for this plan.
  8. Enter in the chosen weekly time.
  9. Click OK.
  10. Click Next.
  11. Check the options to Rebuild Indexes and Update Statistics.
  12. Click Next.
  13. Make sure that “Rebuild Index” task is at the top.
  14. Click Next.
  15. Click the Database drop-down.
  16. In the These databases section, select all the databases you are trying to optimize, such as Altiris, Altiris_Incidents, eXpress, AeXRSdatabase, Symantec_CMDB and Symantec_CMDB_IntelAMT.
  17. Click OK.
  18. Select Change free space per page percentage to and set its value to 10% (20% if only rebuilding indexes monthly).
    • “Sort results in tempdb” should generally not be used; however, if SQL memory resources are low, then this will help, but it does cause rebuilding to take a lot longer.
    • Make sure that Keep index online while reindexing is unchecked.  Altiris databases uses ntext fields which prevent clustered indexes from being rebuilt while online for those tables that have an ntext column.
  19. Click Next.
  20. Chose the same databases as before.
  21. In the Update section, select Column Statistics Only.
  22. In the Scan Type section, select Full scan Click Next.
  23. Check the option to Write a report to a text file and allow it to write to the default location.
  24. Click Next.
  25. Click Finish.

Once the wizard is finished with creation, you can click Close. To execute the maintenance plan, right-click it in the left hand Object Browser pane and click Execute.

Additional Performance Considerations:

  • Make certain that the database files are not physically fragmented. Periodically check the fragmentation level on the volume where the database files are hosted and defragment when needed.
  • See KB49632: Optimizing SQL Server 2005 on Windows Server 2003 for more optimization information.


Article URL http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO8589