KACE Product Support

Yes, it has to be run on VMware - although you can get it to run on VMware Server or Workstation if you have to. The trial is really meant to run on ESX / ESXi. The only hardware requirements that I know of are: 1. a CPU with VT (virtualization technology) and 2. at least 250GB of disk space (don't quote me on that, because I think it may have changed - when I ran the trial last year it required 250GB of disk space).

Andy -

Thanks for the info. But now I was reading the Quick Start guide for the trail and it says that the trail does not support upgrading the server or clients. This flies against what Kace support told me about a test environment for the new KBox OS.

Any thoughts ??

Thanks again.

Andy A.

Are you using a trial KBOX to test 5.1 before upgrading a production KBOX? If so, you may want to just purchase a 3 VM license (relatively inexpensive since you don't have to purchase any more nodes) - this is what my company decided to do. Now we have 2 disaster recovery VMs and a development KBOX VM for use with our production license key (DellKACE is okay with this as long as only 1 server is using the key in production at any given time... i.e. you can't have clients checking in for "production purposes" on more than one).

I know the trial VM is somewhat limited, but I'm not sure exactly which areas are restricted.

Andy -

Interesting idea. That is exactly what we are trying to do - test the new KBox OS (5.1.31237) before we apply it to our production KBox appliance.

I'll talk to our management here and to our Kace rep about pricing.

Thanks for the help.

Andy A.

Andy,

Andy is right. One clarification. You can run the trial (or the production ovf) on VMWare Player and it will be converted to a growable disk so you won't need all the space just to try out the latest version.

His suggestion of getting the multiple vm's is common in our customers - you can apply your backup data or clone as needed to get a sandbox that has a snapshot of your production data for testing purposes.

Chris...

The only issue we ran into with 5.1 was related to our LDAP labels. We have about 1800 LDAP labels that didn't have any items added to them, so they weren't assigned a label type during the upgrade. What resulted was the Inventory page taking about 5 minutes to load because it was considering those 1800 labels to be machine labels.

I'd advise caution if you've got a lot of empty LDAP labels - DellKACE engineering had to modify them via a tether, so I'm not sure if I would've had the ability to fix the problem if I knew what it was.

Another issue with 5.1 is related to parent/child relationships. All child ticket comments are automatically rolled up into parent tickets (you cannot disable this).

Andy & Chris -

These are all great suggestions and ideas. Thanks a bunch !

Andy A.

If you use VMware Workstation and select "File" ->"Open" select show *.ovf files.
The created VM will use a growable disk so you will not need 250GB of disk space to look at the trail version.