How to Create a Customer Testing Environment (4305921)

KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA) is a virtual appliance designed to automate device management, application deployment, patching, asset management, and service desk ticket management. Due to its highly customizable nature, it becomes necessary to test custom implementations as well as test infrastructure and appliance upgrades before applying them to the production environment. The best way to ensure that the testing (development) environment most accurately mimics the production environment, is to build the development appliance using the production backups.

Following these steps require planning, downtime, and careful consideration of the environment. Creating a testing (development) environment requires downtime for the production environment.

The majority of KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA) licenses allow for ONE production appliance and TWO development appliances. In certain rare cases, the license may allow for more than ONE production appliance and TWO development appliances. Check with your sales team or licensing if there are questions on the exact number of allowed instances of the KACE SMA.

If the license only allows the three mentioned instances, a FOURTH appliance or recognition of TWO production appliances may cause a License Exceeded message. Creating multiple boxes, shutting them down and spinning up new ones can also cause this situation.