Altirigos - View Single Post

Mike · 02-12-2008, 06:56 PM

I thought I would post back and let you all know my experience. I just implemented Altrinsic Solutions HIIS tool which is basically an overlay for Altiris DS 6.5-6.9. It is actually sold on the Dell Price List and is reportedly a popular add-on.

The version we are using is 6.9.0.12. How it works is it add several new tables to your express database as well as some programable "Functions" which are similar to stored procedures.

The Tool has a 4 phase approach, Identify the computers that are to be supported by HIIS, collect the drivers, export the jobs and maintain your driver library.

Each of these steps is fairly automated. It did a great job identifying the "hardware classes" based on the existing DS inventory and was able to collect all of my drivers using the built-in job creation tool. The drivers are stored in a unified library on the express share.

When you deploy a HII Image (job generated automatically), it queries the sql functions to create a driver injection script based on your hardware profile and sends the drivers down using a firm copy.

I experienced two issues:
1. the cmdlines.txt template file was missing a parameter on the token used to generage my "application injection". I notified the altrinsic people and the issue is already resolved.
2. The solution is built with a LAN ds environment in mind. All driver injections come from the express share by default. The altrinsic people were extremely responsive to my issue and I was able to successfully reprogram the function to work in this customer's environment.

All in all, I found this to be the easiest tool for creating a hardware independant image with an external driver library. This customer in APAC can now deploy an HII image to any computer in one of their 27 different sites with only one deployment server and WAN links that are only 256k.

Admittedly, I don't have much to compare it to. The last "tool" i used was the first version of HII tools. I understand there is a new one on Juice that you might compare it to.