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The latest release of Altiris Server Management Suite comes with new virtual server deployment capabilities and enhanced Linux and Microsoft offerings.
The Salt Lake City company an–nounced the grab bag of server management upgrades Dec. 13. Altiris will build on its existing virtual server deployment features for VMwares VMware ESX by adding the ability to inventory virtual servers. “Now we can do [an] inventory [check] to see whats happening inside a virtual machine, and we can deliver software [upgrades] to those virtual machines,” said Steve Morton, vice president of product management.
Although the deployment and inventory function is specific today to VMware ESX virtual servers, Altiris will expand that next year to the open-source Xen and Microsoft VM environments, Morton said.
Beyond the virtual server management enhancements, Altiris, in Version 6.2 of the suite, added patch management for Red Hats RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) servers, performance and fault monitoring for Microsofts Exchange Server and SQL Server, and the ability to inventory Exchange and SQL servers.
“From the same single Web console, people can update Windows or Linux machines and keep them up-to-date. The same architecture that we have will allow us to broaden that platform support to various flavors of Linux,” Morton said.
Altiris in early December got a major boost for its hardware and software management efforts when Dell announced that its new OpenManage software is based on Altiris technology. OpenManage delivers operating system and hardware patch management, among other things.