Doesn’t scale well

We have over 200 macs in our organization. I was really hoping ARD would be able to help. Not much…

In our experience, ARD really doesn’t play nice after adding about 50-60 computers to the list. Computers start disappearing from the My Computers list, computers are shown to be offline when they’re really on, sometimes I can’t add a computer to the My Computers list (the drop down literally drops down and goes back up in 1 second), and other stupid bugs. I have to quit and reopen ARD often to fix these things until it happens again.

At one point, I decided to completely erase and rebuild our ARD database (adding computers again from scratch and manually enter the DNS name myself.). It was great, until after hitting about 50 macs to the My Computers list.

Several bugs need to be worked out.
Example: when I deploy a package to more than 1 mac (even from the app, not just the task server), it copies the .PKG unreasonably slow; but do so with 1 (one) single computer, and it’s fast. Why? This didn’t happen for me until after an update to ARD. I promise you, it’s not our network; this never happened before.
Example: Macs in the My Computers list get mismatched DNS names after a while. Even after manually entering them in myself, ARD will a few days later decide it doesn’t want to save my manually entered DNS names for computers.

Huge missing feature for us:
ARD does NOT sync the My Computers list between our admins ARD. We’d have to get the ARD data file off the user Library folder and then give it to our admins if we want to “sync” our My Computers list. So each time we add, delete, or make a change to a Mac in our org, we gotta manually add it to each computer that’s using ARD, or share the data file from our Library folder. That’s just not gonna happen for us, so we decided to use 1 computer that has ARD and VNC into it when we needed to mess with ARD.

I suppose I could get creative, create 4-5 user accounts on our 1 Mac, that’s also running OS X Server app, make an spreadsheet of what computer is on which user account, and flip between the users, since ARD is only stable with about 50 macs, but I’m not wasting my time anymore on this.

Overall, ARD seems to be reasonable (3-4 stars) for something like a single classroom, or a small group of computers, but after 50, forget it.

I suppose after Lion and MDM was born, the door has been opened for other venders to make reliable tools to manage Macs. That’s the direction we’re looking...

IT_Monkey about Apple Remote Desktop