10.0 Pre-Design and Planning

Prior to designing and implementing your ZENworks environment, you should perform an assessment of the impact that ZENworks might have on your environment and the constraints that might exist.

As with any network application, ZENworks will impact the traffic on your network. The impact includes the following:

  • Managed devices communicating with their Primary Servers to receive configuration metadata

  • Managed devices sending data to their collection servers (Primary or Satellite)

  • Managed devices requesting content from their content servers (Primary or Satellite)

  • Devices being imaged using ZENworks imaging (unicast or multicast)

  • Content servers replicating content stored in the ZENworks content store

  • Primary Servers communicating with the ZENworks database

  • Primary Servers communicating with Primary Servers in other zones for subscription content

  • Primary servers communicating with patch sources such as the Novell Customer Center, ZENworks Patch Management repository, and Linux subscriptions

  • Authentication servers communicating with their configured LDAP sources

Before deploying ZENworks, it is important to understand your network topology so that the infrastructure can be properly deployed and configured. Consider these key questions before deploying and using ZENworks:

  • H ow fast is my LAN and WAN speed and what are its peak and non-peak hours?

  • Do I have bandwidth control (throttling) requirements?

  • Given my server and satellite hardware, how many simultaneous connections can I enable? For more information, see Section 4.0, Monitoring and Tuning.

  • What are the TCP/UDP ports used by ZENworks so that firewall exceptions can be added for them?

  • Do I have any devices behind NAT (Network Address Translation)?

  • Do I need ZENworks web traffic to go through the corporate web proxy?

  • Can I reuse my file servers for content?

  • Do I need Out of Band Management?

    • Wake On Lan support?

    • IAMT support?

  • How current does the data that ZENworks maintains for the following need to be?

    • Inventory

    • Audit

    • Messages

    • Status

    • Patch status

This chapter includes the following sections: