Best practices for creating, deploying, and managing baselines.



Keep the max number of components in a baseline equal to or less than 250:

Baselines do not inherently have a limit in the number of components. However, to ensure best possible performance on the clients and relays and their ability to gather, evaluate, and report you will want to limit the number of baseline components.

• Max of 100 components in 6.x deployment (MIME disabled)
• Max of 250 components in a 7.x+ deployment (MIME enabled)

If you still have 6.x clients in your deployment, you will not be able to use efficient MIME. Upgrade your clients to 7.x+ to take advantage of this performance configuration. The setting for efficient MIME is set in the TEM Admin tool under the Advanced Options tab and is named usePre70ClientCompatibleMIME. The default value is false. False means efficient MIME is enabled.

Limit the number of clients that receive non-applicable baselines and baseline actions as much as possible:

Some ways of doing this are to:

• Choose baseline components based on platform form types in deployment.

For example:

Only Windows 7 patches in a baseline

Set relevant computers in Relevance tab of baseline to a group of only Windows 7 computers

Take baseline action and target only Windows 7 machine

 

• Create a separate custom site for each of the platform types

For example:

Create a custom site to keep baselines for only Windows 7 machine

Save these Windows 7 baselines to this Windows 7 custom site

Subscribe only the Windows 7 computers to this Windows 7 custom site.

 

 

Create baselines and take baseline actions as a non-master console operator

This prevents the main actionsite from becoming overloaded. And as all computers in the deployment are required to subscribe to the main actionsite, anything deployed on the main actionsite could quickly overload the deployment.

 

When these best practices are not followed, clients report in slower than normal and the general performance of the deployment degrades. This is because the Client is spending all of its time evaluating large baselines instead of evaluating other content and reporting back up to the server. Clients may start to appear gray (offline) in the console when they have not reported in (time exceeds the "Mark as offline after" setting in the console preferences) Relay operations also slow down and clients are not able to gather new site version in a timely manner. Actions to these clients may also get delayed and take lengthy times to execute and report.

 

Do not set the Post-Action to restart the computer:

Instead plan to have a separate restart action independent of your baslines. Set the post-action to do nothing after baseline completes.