Here’s the situation: Sluggish application performance on one or more of your Windows servers had become so bad as to require intervention. You purchased a license for Condusiv® Diskeeper Server and observed such an amazing performance improvement that you want to deploy Diskeeper® on all your physical servers.

“But how can I centrally manage the application?” you wonder. And then you see that Condusiv Makes Diskeeper Administrator. Bingo!

Diskeeper Administrator gives you centralized control over all your managed servers. The solution enables you to deploy, configure and manage Diskeeper Server, Diskeeper Professional for desktop workstations, and some very early versions of V-locity for virtual machines (VMs). Condusiv plans to integrate SSDkeeper into Diskeeper Administrator sometime in the future.
Note: (V-locity and V-locity Management Console should be used for virtual servers)

For now, though, let’s learn how to deploy and configure Diskeeper Administrator.

Deployment Prerequisites

In addition to purchasing a Diskeeper Administrator license, you should consider a volume-license purchase of Diskeeper Server to save money.
Diskeeper Administrator runs as a Windows service and is a client/server application that uses Microsoft SQL Server for back-end data storage. For a smooth installation experience, I suggest, but not required, having a SQL Server database engine instance already available on the network. Diskeeper Administrator supports the following database versions:

– SQL Server 2005
– SQL Server 2008
– SQL Server 2012

You can use the free Express Edition if you want; in fact, the Diskeeper Administrator installer can automatically install SQL Server 2012 Express Edition. Notably, more recent SQL Server versions are not yet supported.

Like any client/server application, you need to keep firewall rules in mind. Diskeeper Administrator uses the following Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) ports:

– 1434 (for SQL Server)
– 31029
– 31036
– 30137
– 31056
– 31096
– 31116
– 31176
– 31196
– 31216

All your managed servers should have file and printer sharing enabled, which opens TCP ports 139 and 445, and exposes the ADMIN$ administrative share that is used for Diskeeper push installation. In addition, you should open ports 31038 or 31058 to facilitate management traffic. More details on port use is available in the DK Administrator’s online help.

Diskeeper Administrator Install and Setup

The Diskeeper Administrator installer is basically an InstallShield wizard “click-click-next” routine. The real work begins after you lay down the application binaries and start Diskeeper Administrator for the first time.

Speaking of Windows Server, you can install Diskeeper Administrator on any version from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2016, as well as Windows Client versions from Windows 7 to Windows 10. My environment runs Windows Server 2016 exclusively, and Diskeeper products all run just fine.

On first launch of the Diskeeper Administrator console (it’s an honest-to-goodness Windows desktop application and not a browser portal), you’ll see the following requirements dialog:

Continue reading the full Diskeeper Administrator Quick Start Guide »