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During the last 18 months, Symantec Corp. has made a number of company—and thus product—acquisitions. Symantec appears to want to show off its new wares all in one place—to IT buyers benefit and, in some cases, detriment.
Click here to read the full review of Symantecs LCMS 6.0.
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During the last 18 months, Symantec Corp. has made a number of company—and thus product—acquisitions. Symantec appears to want to show off its new wares all in one place—to IT buyers benefit and, in some cases, detriment.
Small and midsize organizations that need to get a handle on user and server management should consider Symantecs LCMS (LiveState Client Management Suite) Version 6.0—for everything from initial provisioning with an operating system to application and patch maintenance to migrating user preferences and data onto a new machine.
The “Version 6.0” on this brand-new suite is likely an acknowledgment by Symantec that most of LCMS components existed as individual products prior to its May release. However, the sum of all these parts—each of which displayed rugged individualism during eWEEK Labs tests—equals essentially a 1.0 release, with all the faults and foibles that such a release entails. Chief among these, our tests quickly found, is that three different agents are required to use all the components of LCMS.
eWEEK Labs recommends the suite, though, mostly because of the familiarity of many of the components—IT managers will have little trouble finding operations staffers who can get up to speed quickly on the management platform. Who hasnt heard of or used the stand-alone versions of Symantecs Ghost (practically the common verb for creating a system image) or pcAnywhere?
Further, the suite covers a broad range of machine types and operating systems. Using the suite, we were able to access, monitor and manage—to a greater or lesser extent—everything from a handheld running Microsoft Corp.s Pocket PC to a server using Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition to a Red Hat Inc. Fedora Core 4 server.
However, few of the suites components use the same management console. Thus, while the functionality of each component was good, management of the products required us to skip from one console to the next—some from an obviously different manufacturer, meaning that the look and feel was entirely different. This garnered LCMS only a “Fair” in our manageability rating and a “Poor” in terms of integration .
Compared with rivals such as LANDesk Software Inc.s LANDesk Management Suite and Altiris Inc.s Client Management Suite, LCMS is middle-of-the-road in price—$152.50 per seat for 10 licenses, including the first year of maintenance.
However, as with nearly every management tool, eWEEK Labs advises that IT managers factor training and implementation costs heavily into the acquisition price. In the case of LCMS, the fact that it can use Symantec Ghost or Symantec DeployCenter images to create operating system images will likely prove to be a considerable cost saver for organizations that already use these technologies. LCMS includes Symantec Ghost for file-based images and DeployCenter for sector-based image creation.
IT managers have other choices, however, that are well worth considering. Altiris Client Management Suite does a good job of keeping desktop system configurations in line—with a single agent tool—and it can scale to much larger enterprises than the 5,000-seat limit Symantec suggests for LCMS.
eWEEK Labs also recommends that IT managers take a close look at rival LANDesk. This is another one-agent tool that neatly integrates operating system, application and patch deployment with good remote control.
Symantecs LCMS supports Linux variants, along with the other operating systems mentioned earlier, but Novell Inc.s ZENworks is especially pushing the envelope for open-source operating system support.
The first thing to realize about LCMS is that it is a dizzying conglomeration of components with confusingly similar names. Therefore, its important to lay out the products to create an orderly framework for considering each of the components .
Symantec LiveState Delivery is a new version of a Symantec software delivery and configuration management tool by the same name. In tests, we installed Delivery first, as recommended by Symantec, so that the agent used for most other components in the suite would be installed on all our systems.
Symantec LiveState Patch Manager is an entirely new product that uses the LiveState agent; Patch Manager provided us with rudimentary vulnerability assessment and a serviceable patch deployment capability during tests.
Symantec LiveState Designer is a rebuilt imaging and full-featured software packaging tool. Along with Delivery, Designer is the chief aspect of LCMS on which IT managers should focus evaluation.
Symantec pcAnywhere for Symantec LiveState is the familiar tool nicely tailored to integrate with LCMS. It worked as expected in tests and uses the common agent, so well say no more about it for now.
Symantec LiveState Discovery provided detailed hardware and software inventory data along with effective ongoing audits of this same information in our test systems. Discovery is supplied through a partnership with Centennial Software Ltd. and has been customized to work in LCMS (although not enough that it didnt need a second agent on our systems).
We did not test Symantec LiveState Delivery Enterprise Manager, an optional component offered in conjunction with professional services.
Next page: Delivery, Designer and Patch Manager.
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From the delivery console, IT managers can deploy Symantec Ghost or Symantec DeployCenter images. We used the Ghost version in LCMS to create images for a variety of Windows operating systems (for servers and desktops) and Linux systems without much fuss.
We used Delivery to distribute software to these same systems and to create software deployment jobs to Unix, Mac OS and Pocket PC systems.
In fact, Delivery supports every operating system IT managers are likely to meet except Palm OS-based devices and Research In Motion Ltd. BlackBerrys. This wide operating system support and the ease with which we could slate deployments are two main reasons for recommending IT managers consider the overall LCMS product.
The Delivery module made it easy for us to deploy the LCMS agent to computers in our network and to create administrative accounts so that we could restrict LCMS operators to specific areas of the product. We could also create computer groups and computer profiles that we assigned to these groups.
Unlike the Web-based tools of many management products, which allow only report viewing or minimal administration, Deliverys Web console enabled us to perform nearly every task that we could when seated at the Windows console. However, each activity—such as assigning a profile to a computer or assigning a software package for distribution to a computer—is a one-way process, with no way to recover from a typing mistake except to start the whole process over.
The Web-based console does have promise. For example, the simple layout and clear categories of activities made it easy for us to quickly get started with creating groups or bringing computers under management with LCMS.
LCMS Designer is where package creation happens, and the module includes a well-thought-out component called Package Manager. Package Manager contains all the familiar tools needed to distribute applications while insulating users from the deployment process.
During tests with the package-creation utilities, we used AutoInstall Snapshot, AutoInstall Builder and a tool that allowed us to create a package that can be used by Microsoft Windows Installer. Given this breadth of choices, its hard to imagine an application that couldnt be accommodated with Designers tools.
While the process of building these packages wasnt quite as comprehensive as dedicated install builders such as New Boundary Technologies Inc.s Prism Deploy, all the packages we created worked when they got to the desktop—and thats the real test of any deployment tool.
Designer also encompasses the Symantec Client Migration tools. We were able to migrate system settings and user data from one Windows XP system to another with no problems. This version of Client Migration includes tools for securely transferring and storing data, a good addition to the product.
As much as we were impressed with Delivery and Designer, the new Patch Manager portion of LCMS was something of a disappointment.
This component is a ho-hum, Windows-only tool that mostly automates assessment and patch management activities that are better served by Microsofts Windows Server Update Services.
During our tests, the finicky Patch Manager stopped working several times when we attempted to perform multiple simple tasks simultaneously. At the end of the day, however, our systems were all correctly patched.
Even though it proved difficult to discover when patches were applied and by whom, we were able, through the granular administrative account management system that is built into LCMS, to restrict patch activities to a specific category of users.
This kind of attention to detail—although it was sometimes quite uneven—makes LCMS quite workable today and lays a solid groundwork for improvement in the future.
Next page: Evaluation Shortlist: Related Products.
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Evaluation Shortlist
Altiris Client Management Suite Uses a single agent to provide good end-user system management (www.altiris.com)
LANDesks LANDesk Management Suite A one-agent, neatly integrated, comprehensive management tool that scales up to midsize and large enterprise use (www.landesk.com)
Novells ZENworks 6.5 Novell just acquired inventory and license master Tally Systems Inc., so we expect to see a boost to ZENworks asset expertise; Version 7.0 of this product is imminent, with an expected focus on Linux (www.novell.com)
Labs Technical Director Cameron Sturdevant can be contacted at cameron_sturdevant@ziffdavis.com.
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