NS Client & x64 Awarness

[Migration User]

Introduction

My name is Dane Jones and I attended the Cleveland Altiris User Group Conference. We are seriously investigating Altiris 7 for integration into our infrastructure and I raised a question in the 1:00 PM "Migrating to 7" Session Presented by Miguel Perez that was unsatisfactorily answered.

Question

Is the Windows Notification Server Agent for Altiris 7 64bit aware? Namely, dose the agent disable Windows on Windows(WoW) file redirection to permit scanning the 64bit regions of the registry and file system?

Allow me to Elaborate

The Windows on Windows(WoW) feature of the current implementations of 64bit Windows uses file redirection to prevent 32bit applications from writing to the 64bit regions of the file system and registry. This has been the primary issue with supporting 64bit Windows clients. However, Microsoft provided a set of API calls that permit a 32bit application to disable the file redirection. Thus, with these calls a 32bit NS Agent can fully inventory a 64bit version of Windows without requiring a natively compiled 64bit Agent.

The obvious advantage to this is that a separate agent is not required for 64bit versions of Windows. In addition, if a 64bit system is mistakenly identified as 32bit then inventory will still function properly without the need of a 64bit version.

The disadvantages are, in my opinion, trivial as I am unable to identify a reason that a 32bit agent will need more that 4GB of RAM or require the extra processing power achieved in a pure 64bit environment. These agents are to produce as little impact to the system as possible if an NS Agent should ever require a native 64bit version, I would seriously consider rethinking the need for such an Agent.

Relevant Microsoft MSDN Links

• Wow64DisableWow64FsRedirection
• Wow64EnableWow64FsRedirection
• Wow64RevertWow64FsRedirection
• GetSystemWow64Directory
• KEY_WOW64_64KEY

[Migration User]

Per Altiris KB46439    "It should be noted that core agents running on x64 platforms currently only support running in WOW64 (32bit emulation mode). This limits
the core agent to seeing only those files and registry entries in the 32bit environment. Full native 64bit support is planned for 7.1"

I'd like to thank you for an extremely well documented and detailed post. Please note you can subscribe to that (and any other) article to show your support\interest in the issue. The more interest, the more likely something stays on the roadmap.

[Migration User]

Our plan is to introduce a native 64bit agent for SMP7 in the first half of 2010.
° Jim Barker · Principal Product Manager \ Symantec Management Platform

Question

  Why is a native 64bit agent necessary when the API calls are available to address the 32bit & 64bit Windows systems with a single agent?

Assumtions

  I can understand as a long term goal that 64bit will be desireable but during the transitional period from 32bit to 64bit, it feels like a bad idea to jump straight to 64bit.

 

[KSchroeder]

Dane,
Not sure as the article Jim linked is a little unclear, but the statement around "a native 64bit agent" may in fact be referencing the methods you called out in your original post.  I agree that a true 64bit-only binary would not really be very beneficial since the agent usually consumes < 50MB of memory, plus it could greatly complicate the Agent API, plug-in/Solution agent interface, and testing requirements (and might necessitate having both 32bit and 64bit "Solution" agents for all CMS/SMS Solutions, which I can only imagine would REALLY delay updates/hotfixes, and lead to all sorts of headaches trying to manage updating all of these).