As several others have posted in the past the windows assessment scan for patch management kicks off at the same for all our servers and triggers alarms in our vmware environment. Our server environment is 80% virtualized and as such impacts our virtual hosts. We have the same issue with Inventory as well. The standard solution is to create separate assessment scan policies with different start times applied to groups of systems to manually stagger the workload.
This is fine but it is less than ideal if the filters happen to overlap or, and more importantly, some systems are left without a scan policy.
Has anyone come up with a creative solution that is less manual and more dynamic? I'm thinking along the lines of 4 (or so) dynamic filters that takes all windows servers with the software update plug-in and drops the first 25% in Filter #1, the next 25% in Filter #2, etc.
Hoping not to reinvent the wheel if someone's already figured this out.
I know for inventory the aexruncontrol.exe can be used to randomize the inventory job and I'll probably end up doing that for our systems (someone posted a way to hack NS7 to do this) but again in a time when most folks are going virtual you'd think that randomization would have been baked into the product. Any Symantec engineers out there know if this is in the works?
Thanks in advance for any ideas
