I wanted to take a moment to summarize the current state of BES 7.0 upgrades as far as we know them as a way to give more information to customers who are trying to plan for the upgrade. We don’t really have any good way to know exactly how many customers have upgraded, but we do know general knowledge from our server logs that help us understand the overall progress.
Here are some (hopefully interesting) stats:
Approximately 5-10% of our customer base updated to 7.0 since it was released (just over a week now).
It appears that we have good coverage worldwide for upgrades (NA, EMEA, AP) and multiple customers in each region have updated.
The size of deployments of customers that have upgraded so far ranges from 50 computers to 25,000 computers.
A couple dozen customers appear to have started up lab evaluations of BES 7.0 to check out some of the features.
Additional Notes from our customers regarding the upgrades:
Make sure you update the BES Console and Server at the same time. If for whatever reason you upgrade one and not the other, you will need to manually upgrade the server/console using http://support.bigfix.com/bes/install/upgradebes.html
Be prepared for the fact that the server upgrade process could take a while because of the database reshuffling tasks that the upgrader performs. In some cases, the upgrade might last up to an hour. (At least one customers killed the upgrade process in the middle of the upgrade, which leaves things in an inconsistent state).
It is good practice to backup your database before the upgrade.
Many customers prefer running the server upgrade manually so they can watch the status updates in the upgrade installer interface. After the upgrade completes, the relays and agents can be upgraded using the Fixlets.
Be aware that there are some significant database changes in 7.0. If you have been querying the database outside of the VIEWS, the database format will change (no more “properties” or “textfields” tables).
An issue was identified regarding upgrading agents from an install that used the MSI installer. We have modified our BES Client upgrade Fixlets to take into account this situation and it should prevent customers from hitting this issue.
Overall we are happy with our upgrade progress and we have received many positive comments from our customers.
We will try to continue to keep everyone updated with periodic postings about progress…
Question about this bullet; - An issue was identified regarding upgrading agents from an install that used the MSI installer. We have modified our BES Client upgrade Fixlets to take into account this situation and it should prevent customers from hitting this issue.
Is there a fix for this yet? I have about 60 clients that the msi was used on.
We have a new release of the BES Client upgrader that fixes this issue, but we are still doing some final testing. This hopefully should be available soon for you.
We’re doing final testing on a fixlet to upgrade the 6.0 MSI clients that could not be upgraded initially to 7.0. I’m attaching it below for those who would like to start testing it out.
Is there a knowledge base article that describes all known issues with the BES 6 -> 7 upgrade?
If not, i think it would be a good idea to put all the known issues in one place. And maybe even a link to this page from the upgrade fixlets.
I ran into some issues that were not posted on this forum or the knowledge base (or i couldn’t easily find them.) Most of these were said to be “known” issues by BigFix support. Having all the known issues posted in one place would have made our upgrade much easier.
I noticed that the attached MSI Upgrade Fixlet, first removes the existing client and then installs the 7 client. Wont this create a new Database object for this computer and doing so, lose all past history?
No, the task does a ‘soft’ uninstall (add/remove programs) that leaves behind the data and reg key entries for the BES Client. If the client is reinstalled, it re-uses the old client information and comes back as the old client. If you do a full uninstall (BESRemove utility or manual deletion of reg keys) then the reinstall will think that its a new BES Client and you’ll get a new database instance for the computer.
Alright… responding to dgibson, we are going to attempt to have some info available about ALL the changes in 7.0.x before it is released… Hopefully this is helpful and we will see how well this works: