Best Practice Recommendation - Removing Records from CMS?

[amandaw33]

In the coming months, we'll be replacing a few hundred PCs with a few hundred new machines.

I'm trying to think through how best to keep CMS cleaned up so that old records are removed & licenses freed up for the new machines (we have a little license leeway).  We don't set a purge PC schedule because sometimes clients don't check in for months at a time, and we don't want to lose those records.

I assume under Manage Computers, if I right click and choose delete that frees up the CMS licenses (assuming that PC never gets turned back on our network), though I'm still trying to confirm this.  I don't want all technicians to have the ability to remove computers, but also dread the thought of them emailing me to remove each of their records as well.  

I'd like to hear how others handle this within CMS.  What works well for us with our Mac Management tool is when a computer is removed from service it is powered off, technician renames computer in console with word delete in it.  I can mass search for word delete and do a bulk delete from that one screen.  It works well, and I can tell by last checkin times, etc if a technician maybe made a mistake before I clear the records.  

I can't think of a similar workflow that would work in CMS to allow techs to notify me when a computer should be deleted and even better give me a way to do deletes from one screen (right clicking on each record and doing delete would be fine).  I'd really prefer to stay out of sql and do it from the console since I'm a sql newb.  

[andykn101]

The trick is to use the "Retired" status with the "Inventory Clean Up" Task to free licences. Just get technicians to add removed PCs into a "Removed PCs" static filter and every week highlight all of them and set them to "Retired". Once they are Retired they no longer appear in the Filter ans Filters only show Active PCs.

[amandaw33]

Thanks, Andy.  Do I have access to Inventory Clean Up Task without Asset Management (we just use CMS here)?

I found this article - but I don't have a Services/Asset Management folder under Jobs/Tasks.  I'm not sure there's any benefit to us using it leaving retired assets in the db but it's an interesting idea.

If I right click and select delete (didn't realize I could do that on filters page in mass), does that free up the licenses?  The best practices article for retiring a computer didn't clear that up for me.

[andykn101]

Perhaps your best bet then is for the techs to set them to retired and you to delete retired computers manually. You can delete them in batches of 20 AFAIK and then you can sanity check what the techs have retired. You've probably seen it but there's this article too: "Best practices for retiring a computer" http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO95111 Edit and there's this suggesting you might not have to delete the Retired assets to reclaim Altiris licenses: "Retiring a computer does not reclaim an Altiris product license" http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH214058

[amandaw33]

Thanks.  Seems way more complicated than it should be.  Seems like all along when I deleted computers from console without retiring them first, I guess those licenses are lost forever.

[amandaw33]

Just an update that I got the Inventory Clean Up task to show up by installing the Symantec CMDB Solution under SIM, install new product, changing filter to none, so that's something.

[amandaw33]

More info from support:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO1201 This article says Inventory, Software Management, Patch and DS all reclame licenses on retirement.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH165332 an additional document regarding PCAnywhere says retirement isn't enough, computer must be deleted to reclaim license.

I still need to do some testing on this.  I want to see if the above articles hold true in our environment and everything gets freed up on retirement except PCAnywhere, and do I get that PCA license back on delete.  I assume I need to leave them retired before deleting, or force some task on server to run to clean up.

I don't understand why the "Best Practices for Retiring Computers" article starts with the Inventory Clean Up Task.  Wouldn't this only make sense as a step after the "mark computer for retirement" step 2?

That troubleshoting document that Andy linked to above says if you just delete a computer and restart services on the server, that frees up licenses too.  Seems like if that works it may be easier than dealing with the whole retirement process if deletion is necessary anyway for PCAnywhere.  Maybe that's why my deleting all along hasn't seem to effect us much license wise. 

I'll report back after I do some testing.

 

 

[amandaw33]

In my testing, setting a computer to retired freed up some licenses immediately (inventory and software, sometimes patch).  If I did resource update and/or restarted the altiris service on the server, the remaining licenses freed up, even PCanywhere.

This is contradictory to the PCAnywhere doc support sent me which said only a delete will free up the license.

I guess my plan of action will be to have techs move computers to static filter, where I'll mark them to retired.

After a day run inventory clean up task, or maybe even schedule it to run ongoing. At some point decide if we want to delete the records all together.

Thanks Andy for helping me think through this. Hope the post helps someone else.