Starting with 8.7 SMA is able to quickly install, upgrade, or uninstall client plugins without involving policies and tasks.
The information about the plugins that need to be processed is passed to the agent via the install XML file. This is the same install XML that is being used to provide SMA with the connection profile and CEM settings.
Install XML sample containing Deployment Plugin info is below. The important fields include plugin name, version, package GUID, and installer's command-line.
There are a few ways install XML can be passed to the agent:
In all the scenarios above the install xml file named AEXNSC.xml is created in the agent installation folder or copied in there and then SMA is restarted. All the scenarios work exactly the same way after that:
Release: 8.7
When the quick installer starts at step #11 (see above) it creates the following registry entries under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Altiris\Altiris Agent
The first one is removed at the end of the quick install sequence at step #15 and can be used to detect if the quick installer is currently running or if it was running before and crashed for some reason. The crash dump should be created in the later case.
The second registry entry is meant for plugin installers usage, they use this registry entry to detect if they are running in "quick install" mode and that they should not start or stop SMA service or send basic inventory. The second registry entry is also used by the SMA service at step #16 to detect that the installation sequence has ended and that it should send the basic inventory.
Quick Installer copies both AEXNSC.xml and QuickInstall.xml that were used during the installation sequence to the "InstallLogs" folder, see sample below. There could be multiple XMLs in case a quick installation sequence was running multiple times, pay attention to the time stamp in the name. These files are never cleaned up.
Below is the installation sequence sample obtained by using the filter "QuickInstaller" in the log viewer. Two plugins get validated, downloaded, and installed.
Loading and plugin validation stages go first - AEXNSC.ml gets loaded, and plugins get checked one by one.
Downloading stages go then - two plugins get downloaded one by one, which can take some time, the download timeout for each package is set to 10 minutes, if the plugin download cannot be started in 10 minutes, then that plugin will be skipped.
Then SMA service starts the quick installer by passing the path to QuickInstall.xml to AEAGENTUTIL.exe using /quickinstall parameter
The quick installer then stops SMA service
The quick installer then validates and installs plugins one by one starting SMA service at the end
Unified policy allows the admin to schedule plugin updates via policy, The policy with the specified plugins in the list is processed only once. In order to process the same policy again the admin should change the plugins list.
This policy tracking mechanism is based on a policy run history, which is stored as a set of files in the "Quick Installer" folder, see below.
Each file name consists of policy GUID and policy content hash. You can force SMA to run the policy again by removing the history file.
Each history file contains XML describing the policy rollout result, see below. By matching the time to XML files in the "InstallLogs" folder you can find AEXNSC.xml and QuickInstall.xml files that were used during particular policy rollout.
So generally, SMA logs should be gathered from the Agent, and then we can check the mentioned folders if data was generated there.
Also, note that only the current list of Agents on 8.7 supports Quick Install method: