LANDesk problems updates

Today, there hasn’t been too much progress with the LANDesk issues. However, a few of us have spent some time investigating some additional potential reasons that may be causing this really bad agent behavior.

Here are some findings on the existing problems:

CPU Usage: We found a couple of things, that are inconclusive, but something to ponder:

1. There may be some correlation between the high CPU usage and the Windows Search Service. It may be that we just noticed an improvement in the CPU usage, just because we eliminated the Windows Search Service, and not anything related to the LANDesk agent itself.
2. In looking at the agent behavior, we noticed that the high CPU usage is happening only on Virtual Machines running VMWare view. Physical machines don’t seem to be affected too much by the LANDesk agent, and seem to be operating normally, to our knowledge.
3. We compared Virtual Machines that are running View vs. Virtual machines that are not running View, and we noticed that the ones that aren’t running View don’t seem to be having the problem with the CPU. The only difference between those two are:
1. The View Agent is installed on on, and isn’t installed on the other.
2. The View workstation has 512Mb of RAM, where the physical machine  has 2Gb: CPU on the View machine, (reported by vCenter) is averaging around 480Mhz, where the CPU on a non View machine, running SQL (Granted not too busy), is consuming an average of about 70Mhz.  Which tells us that the LANDesk agent alone is somehow  consuming about 410Mhz. This may be because its memory footprint is so big that it’s taking up the 512Mb, and paging the rest, which is causing the CPU to peak. Either way, that’s not acceptable for the agent.

Antivirus Engine Stopped: This issue is still happening where the Antivirus engine doesn’t start after the update of the LANDesk agent (even from a previous or same version of the LANDesk antivirus). The message, stating that there is another resident Antivirus product still pops up, until the machine is rebooted.

A new issue that we’ve discovered today, was the fact that the LANDesk Antivirus engine just does not start on Windows 2000 workstations. We have observed this on 6 user machines. I have also installed a clean installation of Windows 2000 Pro with SP4 and all updates, and observed the same exact behavior. This is an issue we need to bring up with LANDesk, and make sure that it gets resolved.

In addition, we noticed that, the ScrewDrivers client (for Citrix) stops working if it is running the v4 client with the 9.0 agent of LANDesk on Windows 2000 machines. So the workaround for this issue, is to make sure to downgrade the Screwdrivers client to v3.56  when running LANDesk Agent v9.0 on a Windows 2000 Pro workstations.

As of today, I haven’t heard back from LANDesk to get a status on the open cases. I’m hoping that by tomorrow we’ll be in contact and get an update on the resolution process of these problems.

For any questions, please contact me.