Before upgrading
Perform these steps before upgrading the BigFix components:
- Ensure that the BigFix WebUI service is stopped before starting to upgrade the BigFix components, and do not start it again until the overall upgrade procedure completes successfully. This step applies any time, regardless of whether the WebUI is installed on the same system as the BigFix Server or on a different system.
- Close all BigFix consoles.
- Back up your BigFix server and database as described in Server Backup.
- Back up your
license.pvk
,license.crt
, andmasthead.afxm
to a separate location on the BigFix server or to a USB key. - Ensure that you have enough free space for the BigFix database. The free space projection involves a number of factors: the row counts of specific tables, the density of the data pages storing the tables and indexes, and specific database options for log management and table compression. The basic rule of thumb for the 9.5 upgrade is to ensure that you can accommodate a 100% growth in the size of the database (twice its current size) if upgrading from V9.2. The additional space is required to manage the growth of tables for UTF-8 transcoding, including the allocation of temporary space for the movement of data within the BigFix databases. You can determine the database size through the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.
- Upgrade SQL Databases.
- Increase the replication interval to prevent the replication from failing repeatedly during the upgrade. For additional information, see Changing the replication interval on Windows systems.
- Upgrade the BigFix components in the
following order:
- The console and the server must have the same version and must be upgraded at the same time.
- Relays
- Clients
Note:Existing BigFix proxy configurations defined on the server are automatically migrated to the V9.5 proxy configuration settings and behavior. For more information about BigFix V9.5 proxy configuration settings, see Setting up a proxy connection.
If the existing proxy configuration exploits the
BESGather_Service
, during the migration you are prompted to enter the password of the user that you specified for theBESGather_Service
. The migration process uses that password to access the Internet Explorer and to map the proxy configuration settings into the set of registry keys used in V9.5 and documented in Proxy configuration settings for server and relays. - In a Distributed Server Architecture (DSA) environment, run the BigFix server upgrade on the primary server first, then upgrade the secondary servers.
- After the upgrade, run the BigFix
Administration Tool to do the following tasks:
- Update the data with SHA-2 signature.
- Update a remote database.
- Set the NIST security standards, if needed.
Note:
- For large deployments, the server upgrade might take several minutes.
- After upgrading, you might experience a slower deployment. The upgrade downtime might create a backlog of client reports and it might take several hours for the BigFix server to process this backlog after the upgrade has been completed.
- Check your password characters. After the upgrade, passwords containing non-ASCII characters are corrupted and users cannot log in anymore. In this case, before using the product, you must reset this type of password to either the same password or a new password without non-ASCII characters.