Superagents And Broadcast Wake-Up Calls; System Requirements And Supported Operating Systems And Processors - McAfee EPOLICY ORCHESTRATOR 4.5 Product Manual

Distributing Agents to Manage Systems
About the McAfee Agent
• On a schedule set by the administrator — This approach is useful when agent-server
communication has been disabled on the General tab of the McAfee Agent policy catalog.
The administrator can create and deploy a wake-up task , which triggers a wake-up call on
a schedule.
Some reasons for issuing an agent wake-up call are:
• There has been a change in policy that you want the agent to adopt immediately, without
waiting for the next ASCI.
• You have created a new task that you want the agent to run immediately.
• A query has generated a report indicating that a client is out of compliance, and you want
to test its status as part of a troubleshooting procedure.
If you are running Microsoft Windows and have converted a particular system to use as a
SuperAgent, it can issue wake-up calls to designated network broadcast segments. SuperAgents
distribute the bandwidth impact of the agent wake-up call, and help distribute network traffic.

SuperAgents and broadcast wake-up calls

If you operate in a Windows environment and plan to use agent wake-up calls to initiate
agent-server communication, consider converting an agent on each network broadcast segment
into a SuperAgent.
SuperAgents distribute the bandwidth load of concurrent wake-up calls. Instead of sending
agent wake-up calls from the server to every agent, the server sends the SuperAgent wake-up
call to SuperAgents in the selected System Tree segment. When SuperAgents receive this
wake-up call, they send broadcast wake-up calls to all agents in their network broadcast
segments.
The process is:
1 Server sends a wake-up call to all SuperAgents.
2 SuperAgents broadcast a wake-up call to all agents in the same broadcast segment.
3 All agents (regular agents and SuperAgents) exchange data with the server.
4 An agent without an operating SuperAgent on its broadcast segment is not prompted to
communicate with the server.
To deploy enough SuperAgents to the appropriate locations, first determine the broadcast
segments in your environment and select a system (preferably a server) in each segment to
host a SuperAgent. Be aware that agents in broadcast segments without SuperAgents do not
receive the broadcast wake-up call, so they do not call in to the server in response to a wake-up
call.
Agent and SuperAgent wake-up calls use the same secure channels. Ensure that:
• The agent wake-up communication port (8081 by default) is not blocked.
• The agent broadcast communication port (8082 by default) is not blocked.
NOTE: Client firewalls might block communication from the ePO server. Ensure that the ports
required for communication from the ePO server are not block by a firewall on the client.
System requirements and supported operating systems and
processors
This section specifies the system requirements for McAfee Agent 4.5 and the operating systems
and processors it supports.
McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator 4.5 Product Guide 63