LANDesk gave us virtually everything we wanted in a client management product — and more. Plus, the LANDesk Management Suite‘s support for diverse platforms was superb.
Its asset inventory scans were quick, accurate and unobtrusive. In addition to finding standard desktops, these scans detected VMware-based virtual machines on the network, but otherwise Management Suite did not offer any support for virtual clients or servers, which is becoming a growing concern in most enterprise networks. The remote control feature gave us seamless, transparent access to any desktop machine in the organization. LANDesk Management Suite successfully delivered and configured application software packages (either initial installs or patch updates) to Windows, Linux and Macintosh clients. Operating system upgrades, service pack installations and security patch deployments were a breeze, with wizards guiding us unerringly along the way. Backing out service packs and security patches was similarly easy. It correctly and easily monitored our software licenses.
In terms of security measures, LANDesk Management Suite monitored, updated and configured LANDesk’s own antimalware component, but, unfortunately, LANDesk doesn’t support the monitoring and configuring of third-party antimalware tools. The LANDesk antimalware tool thwarted 90% of the miscreants we threw at it, but most enterprises already have antimalware tools they rely on. LANDesk’s security score reflects our belief that it should work with these other tools, too.
LANDesk Management Suite also includes a feature called DHCP Network Access Control (NAC), which integrated closely with Cisco devices’ NAC implementations on our network. Management Suite correctly identified and quarantined the desktop PCs whose OS patches we’d deliberately made out-of-date. LANDesk’s Host Intrusion Prevention System did an adequate but not perfect job of alerting us to the external threats.
LANDesk Management Suite efficiently and accurately discovered our network and deployed agents to our Windows NT/XP/2000/2003/Vista clients via an easy-to-use wizard-guided console push operation. For Windows 95 and 98, we used login script entries, while for other clients (Mac OS X, Linux), we directed local network administrators to visit each client to run the agent install tool. Impressively, LANDesk’s agent watcher restarted the agents on the clients when, for example, “power users” attempted to end the agent processes on a client machine.
LANDesk Management Suite consists of one or more Core servers, a console (user interface), a Web server (for browser-based access to administrative functions), a Core database and a Core Rollup database. A Core server is the center of a management domain. All the key files and services for LANDesk Management Suite are on the Core server. The Core database stores desktop management detail, while the Core Rollup database summarizes data from multiple Core databases. The Core Rollup database, which is optimized for queries, is the source of report data requested through the Web browser interface. A small organization might choose to run all these components on a single server, but enterprises should run each one, especially the core server and database, on dedicated servers.
LANDesk Management Suite’s user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate. For tasks such as operating system deployment and application upgrades that would otherwise be complex and subject to possible setup errors, LANDesk supplies a set of wizards. Even though we were new to LANDesk Management Suite, these wizards made the administration of our desktop machines foolproof and painless. The comprehensive and thoughtfully-designed Web GUI user interface allowed us to perform LANDesk actions from anywhere on the network.
We also tested LANDesk’s Management Gateway, a useful appliance that encrypts and forwards desktop management traffic from subnet to subnet so that we didn’t have to reconfigure our firewalls to specially allow that traffic.
LANDesk Management Suite runs on Windows Server 2000/2003. It can use the Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE) to store data for fewer than 100 clients, but larger organizations will need to separately license one of the relational databases that LANDesk Management Suite can work with, either SQL Server or Oracle.
Unique among the reviewed products was LANDesk’s support for diverse client platforms, including handheld devices running Java, Palm or Windows Mobile (it tracks handhelds as assets, noting model and configuration information and can copy files to or from Pocket PC units); embedded devices running Wyse, HP or Teklogix; Neoware and Capio One devices running the Windows CE image; desktops and laptops running Windows, Mac OS, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Mandrivia, Novell NetWare, Linux and Solaris.
