21 Mar 2022

Site Manager - Adding a computer and installing an Agent Remotely

Macrium Site Manager enables the central management of endpoints using a Macrium Agent. The Macrium Agent enables a computer to communicate with the Site Manager. To centrally manage backups using the Site Manager, the target computers must have the Macrium Agent installed. Macrium Site Manager can remotely install the Macrium Agent on the target computers.

To remotely install Macrium Agent on a computer, first launch the Macrium Site Manager and navigate to the ‘Computers’ page. On the computers page, select ‘Add’ to open the ‘Add Computers’ wizard.

On the first page of the wizard, specify the method that you want to use to add the computer to the Site Manager. These options are:

Add Domain Computers - This uses the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to search an Active Directory domain for computers to add to the Site Manager.

Add Network Computers - This option enables you to add computers to the Site Manager that have Windows Network Discovery enabled.

Add Computers Attempting to Connect - Agents that have already been configured to communicate with the Site Manager, but have not yet been added to the Site Manager can be added using this option. An example of when this will be used, is when Agents are manually installed and then added to the Site Manager. For more information about installing an Agent manually, please see the article below:

Installing the Agent manually then adding that computer to Site Manager

Add Computers Manually - This option allows you to manually specify the computer that you want to add to the Site Manager using IPv4/v6, NetBIOS, or DNS. Multiple entries can be specified by separating them using a semicolon (;).

Once you have selected the method you want to use, select ‘Next’. On the second page of the ‘Add Computer’ wizard you can then select the computers that you want to add to the Site Manager, using the method that you selected.

In this example, we will be using ‘Add Computers Manually’. On the second page of the wizard, you can select/specify the computers that will be added to the Site Manager.

Once you are happy with the computers you have specified, select ‘Next’. The following page of the wizard will show you the results of the computers you have added to the Site Manager.

‘Added’ in the ‘Status’ column means that the computer has successfully been added to the Site Manager. ‘Not Added’ means that the Site Manager IP lookup was unsuccessful, and as a result, the computer was not added to the Site Manager. If IP addresses are added, the Site Manager server will attempt to look up the name for the Agent using reverse DNS lookup. If this fails, the computer can still be added by name manually.

Once the computer has been added to the Site Manager, the computer will be shown as disconnected, unless the Site Manager Agent is already running on that computer and configured to connect to this Site Manager server, this is due to the computer not having a Macrium Agent installed on it. To correct this, select the computer in question and then select, ‘Install Agent’. This option will use Windows File Sharing to copy the installer to the computer in question and then run the installer.

Once the installation has completed, the Agent will show as ‘Initializing’ while it connects to the Site Manager.