HW Cloning - Activation & Hostname

[Ali Akbar 0]

Hi ESET Team,

I have a few question on disk cloning, The scenario is I want to deploy 1000 new computers with ESET Endpoint Antivirus with the ESMC agent. For that I will create one master disk clone which installed with OS and few software, including ESET Endpoint Antivirus and also ESMC Agent, So what is the best practice for ESET Endpoint Antivirus on :

1. Activation 
- Should I activate first the endpoint before cloning to another machine or active the product after the cloning ?

2. Hostname
- As we know, cloning machine will use same hostname and we will change once the cloning process is done for another machine.Will the agent report to ESMC the new hostname or still will report the original hostname from the master cloning disk ?

Kindly please advice the best practice for the above scenario 

Thank You

[Marcos 5,250]

Please read https://help.eset.com/esmc_admin/70/en-US/support_vdi.html for more information about cloning.

[MichalJ 434]

In general, my recommendation would be as following: 

1. Create a base image computer, with ESMC agent and not activated Endpoint
2. Let it connect at least once to ESMC, and in the ESMC interface mark the machine as "master for cloning" (navigate to computer details, click on the button "hardware" in the footer, select option "mark as master for cloning" and choose option "create new computers")
   1. By doing this, every new computer cloned from the image will be automatically created as a new system in ESMC 
3. By default, there is a dynamic group "not activated security product". What you should do is to create a "product activation task", using your license, and setting it with two triggers on this dynamic group (click on the dynamic group, select "new task", choose "product activation" and them set a trigger: 
   1. First would be "joined dynamic group trigger" - anytime a new machine is connected, it would be activated
   2. Second would be "hourly" (you can specify this by CRON expression, guidance is in the product documentation). Therefore, if a client fails to activate on the first attempt it will repeat again every hour. If the client is activated, task won´t be executed.. 
4. Set a server task "rename computers" for the group, where the VDI machines will be created. Therefore, once the machine is renamed, correct name will be updated in ESMC automatically. Please note, that you can specify target group directly in the installer of the agent, each cloned instance would then respect this setting. 

Edited April 11, 2019 by MichalJ
minor correction