All,

Just a quick note to let you know that we’re releasing ADDM 8.1.01 in the next couple of days. While this is just a maintenance release, it has some cool stuff that you will find useful:

1) Kickstart install: We find that most people really appreciate the appliance install model, in particular the simplicity and ease with which the product is deployed. However, the virtual machine approach sometimes runs into problems with clients who have lots of red tape around deploying VMs, and also for those clients who need to run the product at high scale but can only attach SAN storage to a VM.

In 8.1.01, we’re providing an additional install medium: the kickstart DVD. This is a bootable DVD that installs the ADDM product and its bundled OS onto a dedicated server. This enables clients to deploy a physical server running ADDM 8, while preserving the advantages of the appliance model.

2) Pattern instrumentation: If an instance of ADDM is having performance issues, it can be hard to figure out where the problem lies. Misbehaving patterns are usually the culprit, but which one? This new instrumentation functionality tells you which patterns are using a lot of system resources, and also gives you a breakdown of where the patterns are spending their time – datastore queries, discovery, inferencing, datastore updates, etc.

3) Interoperability fixes: ADDM 8.1 is in Controlled Availability because of the issues experienced in some rare cases with duplicates in the CMDB. The couple of issues that were in the ADDM 8 product have been corrected in 8.1.01. Note that this doesn’t entirely fix the problem because a lot of the issues are actually in Bladelogic server and Atrium Core – which is why ADDM 7 had these problems as well. We’re working with the other product teams to ensure that we address the issues there.

Hello Simon,

Can you please let me know how to get this “bootable DVD”? What kind of hardware/software would be required?

Regards,
Pankaj

Hi Pankaj –

The Hardware spec is here. You can download the KickStart DVD from the BMC EPD Site. Look for: BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping 8.1.01 64 bit (Kickstart Install)

Regards,

Chris

Thanks Chris.

Don’t forget you only use the kickstart DVD for the initial build of the hardware based appliance. From then on you use the normal upgrade process.

A kickstart erases all existing disk partitions on the hardware, so don’t try to use one to upgrade!