We are pleased to announce that BES 7.0 is now available!
BES 7.0 adds many new features including the new Distributed Server Architecture (DSA), Bigfix Agent “Offers”, role-based BES Console permissions, improved performance, dynamic bandwidth throttling, improved APIs, and much more. Information about the new features in BES 7.0 are available at http://support.bigfix.com/bes/changes/changes-7.0.html and a more detailed changelist is available at http://support.bigfix.com/bes/changes/fullchangelist-7.0.txt .
Upgrade Process:
Here are a few commonly asked questions about the upgrade process. The upgrade process should be quick and easy, but please pay careful attention to the notes to avoid any problems:
Most BES customers with a current license are entitled to the upgrade at no cost (check with your sales representative if you have any licensing questions).
Upgrades can be done using the Fixlet messages in the BES Support site (there is a different Fixlet message for each BES component upgrade).
Rather than release the Fixlet messages to upgrade to all customers at once, the upgrade Fixlets will be become relevant for different companies over the couple of weeks. If you don’t see the upgrade Fixlet message relevant now, you can wait until they become relevant (at some point soon) OR you can manually upgrade your BES Server and BES Console and the upgrade Fixlet messages for other components will become relevant shortly afterwards.
The safest way to upgrade the BES components is in a “top-down” fashion. The recommended order is:
Upgrade the BES Server and BES Consoles at the same time.
Upgrade the BES Server before the upgrading the BES Relays.
Upgrade the BES Relays before upgrading the BES Clients.
Earlier BES Clients and BES Relays are reverse compatible with the newer BES Relays and BES Server so you do not need to upgrade all the components at the same time as long as you upgrade in the order noted above (however, some features will not be available until all the components are upgraded).
The BES Client upgrade Fixlet message will only become relevant after the BES Server and BES Relays are upgraded (it can take up to 6 hours for the BES Client upgrade Fixlet message to become relevant after the BES Server/Relays are upgraded).
If you have any questions, please contact your support technician. Please also note that with the release of BES 7.0, we will no longer support BES 5.0 and earlier versions (BES 5.1 is still supported).
We encourage all BES users to upgrade whenever possible to take advantage of the new features and improvements.
I upgraded my BES Client today and did not have good results. These are now fixed thanks to support.
The issues, after clicking the “Updated BES Server and BES Console Now Available! (Version 7.0.1)” fixlet I could not log on to my remote console. The failure was complaining about the DB not being supported by the console version.
I had to manually upgrade the remote console and then reinstall the BES server console. This was discribed to be a a chicken-and-egg situation, that I could not log on to my console becuase my console was at a lower version than my bigfix server, but I could not upgrade my console because I needed to log on to my console to upgrade and I could not log on to my console because… (round and round we go!).
Not sure why the console on my server was not upgraded from the above fixlet…?
Anyway installed and running… apart from Web Reports as that now requires flash… not that that is mentioned anywhere! Trying to get that to work now… not what I would call a nice upgrade procedure though.
When is the AIX client expected? I would have thought that ALL the clients should have been released on the same day (I know just a dream in a mscentric world). Do I just need to wait upto 6 hours as you say, even thougth my windows clients were seen as down level in 5 minutes?
Yes. You have to upgrade the BES Console AND the BES Server at the same time when you increase upgrade to a new major version of BES because the old BES Console can’t connect to the new BES Server. This is explicitly stated in the upgrade Fixlet:
"Upgrade all BES Server and BES Console components at the same time with this Fixlet message (if they are upgraded separately, you will not be able to connect with the BES Console). "
It is for this reason that we combine the BES Console and BES Server upgrades into one Fixlet. However, even though they are in one Fixlet, you must target the Fixlet to your server and all consoles at the same time. Additionally, if you have BES Consoles on computers without the BES Client, you must upgrade them manually.
Luckily there is an easy upgrade process for the console by manually running the upgrade installer as detailed here:
When I started to upgrade the BES Server manually, at the very end of the wizard before the upgrade process begins it states ‘create a new SQL database and rows etc etc’ Is this really going to do that and replace my current Database? The database is on a remote system so I don’t know what I should do.
When I started to upgrade the BES Server manually, at the very end of the wizard before the upgrade process begins it states ‘create a new SQL database and rows etc etc’ Is this really going to do that and replace my current Database? The database is on a remote system so I don’t know what I should do.
yes, we are in the same situation and need to know 1) what rights are needed & 2) what changes are made so we can pacify our DBA’s requests for this data.
Before you upgrade, make sure that you have copies of any custom reports as mine are currently not available. Support is looking in to where thay have gone!
Well, I went through the process and got an error stating it couldn’t update the database because of some sort of consistency and finished through the install. Afterwards, I could not log into the BES Console (7.0) which gave an error 'An error occurred while attempting to connect to the database: Database Error: The database being connected to has a database version of ‘Enterprise 1.58’, and this application requires a database version of ‘Enterprise 1.96’. So…I tried to re-run setup and it would not let me repair so I had to remove BES Server all together. I re-ran setup and it did not update the database again and I get the same error stated above. How can you updated the database??? I am pretty much dead in the water right now.
Well, I went through the process and got an error stating it couldn’t update the database because of some sort of consistency and finished through the install. Afterwards, I could not log into the BES Console (7.0) which gave an error 'An error occurred while attempting to connect to the database: Database Error: The database being connected to has a database version of ‘Enterprise 1.58’, and this application requires a database version of ‘Enterprise 1.96’. So…I tried to re-run setup and it would not let me repair so I had to remove BES Server all together. I re-ran setup and it did not update the database again and I get the same error stated above. How can you updated the database??? I am pretty much dead in the water right now.
Sounds like the same kind of problem I had. Are you trying to connect to the BES console on the BES server or a remote BES console (your PC)?
Try to connect from the console on the BES server and you should be able to, then you can upgrade your other BES consoles.
The console is on the BES Server. The problem is the upgrade did not upgrade the database and I don’t know how I can force the upgrade of it. It also messed up the database and I had to restore it.
I don’t see any fixlets in my BES Support site for upgrading to version 7.0.
Marty
The following was included in the original e-mail from Announcements for BES Administrators …
Announcements for BES Administrators
Rather than release the Fixlet messages to upgrade to all customers at once, the upgrade Fixlets will be become relevant for different companies over the couple of weeks. If you don’t see the upgrade Fixlet message relevant now, you can wait until they become relevant (at some point soon) OR you can manually upgrade your BES Server and BES Console and the upgrade Fixlet messages for other components will become relevant shortly afterwards.
Simplified private key management. The BES Console only needs a single file now (publisher.pvk) instead of all three private key files. The two public certificates (license.crt and publisher.crt) are now stored in the database and loaded automatically.
Does this mean that I’m going to have to recreate all the Console Operator accounts and reissue their credentials?
The first time you configure the server it creates registry keys to decide if it is a Local Database install or a Remote Database install. If you originally installed the BES Server as a Local and then manually changed it over to a remote then the upgrade does not know about the remote DB.
The easiest way to fix this is to:
Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Data Sources (ODBC) on the Main BES Server
On the System DSN tab check the bes_EnterpriseServer, bes_bfenterprise, enterprise_setup, and LocalBESReporting are pointing to the correct server.
On the Main BES Server run the BES Admin tool, it should not prompt you to upgrade the database.
On the Main BES Server run the command to initialize the Web Reports DB outlined here:
Is there any ETA on the new fixlet to upgrade the older clients? We are still seeing the fixlet that warns against pushing out the upgrade to pcs that originally were installed with the MSI package.
Upgraded to 7 today. As well would like to have Custom Reports back. And none of my previously created reports have any data. The reports exisit and when I open the fields/filters, etc are there - but no data. I forced a cache refresh - but nothing yet. Should I do anything else? Thanks.
Nevermind! It took about 30 minutes for all the data to finally catch up. All is well. And I have found out how to bring my custom report back in to Reports. Good thing I had read this post and made backups of all my customs. Thanks.
So far v7 is going ok. Only thing really - is that I have found no difference in how the console loads. It is still very slow. I was really hopeful that it would of sped up the load time - but it is still taking 1-3 minutes to load.
Upon upgrade, the agents will send up some more details about some of their properties. This will cause a small surge in your bufferdir, but like you mentioned we expect it to be processed fairly quickly. I think we can make an adjustment in this behavior to avoid this in a future point release of BES 7.0.x. Also, we were tweaking some of the performance enhancements in 7.0.x and I think we have found a small change which makes loadup time faster by allowing you to work in the console while loading things in the background. This enhancement should be included in this new point release as well.