Users Guide

18 Planning Your IT Assistant Installation

Primary Planning Questions

System types and network management objectives differ among enterprises. Answering the following

questions can better prepare you for an IT Assistant installation that will support your company's goals

for network management. After reading this section, see Table 2-4 before performing your installation.

What are the basic hardware and operating system requirements for installing IT Assistant? Does my

enterprise meet them?

Is there any reason to select a particular operating system among those that are supported when

installing IT Assistant?

Is there any reason to select a particular hardware configuration when installing IT Assistant?

4 Do I want to use the default installed database (MSDE) or should I install the Microsoft

SQL

Server database?

• How many systems do I want to discover or manage?

• How dense do I expect the event traffic to be on my network?

Which systems management protocol(s) should I plan to install or enable?

• What type of systems do I want to manage?

• What agents and instrumentation are currently installed on my managed systems?

• What agents do I want to eventually run on my managed systems?

• Which protocols do these agents require or support?

How should I organize my managed systems’ IP addresses if I am using more than one systems

management protocol on a subnet?

Selecting the Operating System

You can install IT Assistant on any system that is running one of the operating systems in Table 2-1.

NOTE: IT Assistant is not supported on Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003.

NOTE: See your Microsoft operating system documentation when installing and configuring Terminal Services or

Remote Desktop.

NOTE: IT Assistant cannot be installed on Dell™ servers running Red Hat

Enterprise Linux operating systems.

These servers can, however, launch IT Assistant through supported browsers (Mozilla version 1.7.3 and later, and

Firefox version 1.0.1 or later).

Table 2-1. Minimum Supported Operating System Requirements for IT Assistant

Small (up to 500 Managed Systems) Large (500 + Managed Systems)

Microsoft Windows

XP Professional with SP2 Windows Server 2003 with SP1

Windows 2000 with SP4 Windows 2000 with SP4

Windows Server

™ 2003 with SP1 Windows 2000 with SP4