Saturday, March 15, 2008

TPM 5.1.1 Classroom Comments

Posted by: martinc on Mar 05, 2008 - 07:42 PM

I recently taught a custom class we developed for TPM 5.1.1 and thought I would provide some feedback on TPM 5.1.1

Performance
Well first of all, I just want to say a word on performance. I taught almost the same class on 5.1.0 FP01 and 5.1.1 using all the same hardware and I was impressed with the performance. I had some students in this class from the class I taught a year ago on 5.1.0 and they stated that everything was running faster. In fact I had more students this time and there was almost no lag when running various tasks.

Comments on the use/functionality
Web Replay - although this was not really part of the class, we had some extra time to look at it. We felt that the tool was interesting and probably good as a training tool and possibly for some tasks. Generally speaking, I (or someone that has been using the interface for a while) can manage to get things done faster than Web Replay. This is still a good addition though.

Computer information
The layout of the Computer information is very clean. The General tab displays a very good summary of important information about the computer.

Compliance and Remediation (also applies to patching)
The 3 step process layout makes the creation of a compliance check very easy.

Here is a snapshot of the Compliance tab for a group (Click on the image to see a larger one).



Notice the easy Step 1 2 and 3. Also under the Step one there is a quick checkbox to add the OS Patches and Updates Check. Simple!

Discovery
The integration of SMB and SSH discovery in one discovery configuration is also a biggy. Seems minor, but it is a pain to set up two seperate discovery scans that hit the same ip addresses.

Another nice feature in the discovery is that it will populate the operating system name. To do this in previous versions, you either had to run an inventory scan or manually add it. This saves some time.

Depot (CDS) Installation
In 5.1.0 in order to install a depot on a system that was already a TCA, you would have to first uninstall the TCA and then run the depot install. In 5.1.1, this has been fixed. The install will recogize that the TCA is already installed and only install the depot subagent.

SOA Rename
One fun thing while developing the course was that I noticed that everything was changed from SOA to SDI. SDI is Scalable Distribution Infrastructure. This name sure makes a lot more sense for the function than SOA.

Other
Just some Acronyms for you to make your day.

CAS – Common Agent Services
CDS - Content Delivery Service
CIT – Common Inventory Technology
DCM – Data Centre Model
DMS – Device Management Service
JES – Job Execute Service (also referred to as DMS)
SAP – Service Access Point
SDI – Scalable Distribution Infrastructure
SIE – Software Installation Engine
SOA – Service Oriented Architecture
SPE – Software Package Editor
TPM – Tivoli Provisioning Manager
TPMfOSD – TPM for Operating System Deployment
TPMfOSDEE – TPMfOSD Embedded Edition
TPMfSW – TPM for Software
WSDL – Web Services Definition Language

No comments: