Migration of BigFix application from Windows 2008 server to windows 2012 server

Usage and Config Platform
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Hello All,

We are planning to migrate our BigFix environment from Windows 2008 to windows 2012 server, please help me with the ans of below queries:-

  1. Why BigFix should be installed on Physical server rather then virtual server ?
    Do we have any technical documentation from BigFix prospective.
    2.while performing the migration does it required to have same DNS name ,IP address and hostname of older root server ? Also hardware should be same for new server ?
    Note:- In masthead file,DNS name is mentioned .
    3.currently we have 9.5.3 version installed on windows 2008 server and while migrating to windows 2012 server, we directly want to install 9.5.9 using existing masthead.
    Note:- Before installing 9.5.9, we will attach the older instance of besreporting and bfenterpise to new database which is located locally and then install 9.5.9 using existing masthead file.
    Is this the correct approach and if yes, will all the custom content will be available in console ?

Regards,
Manish Singh

2

Hello!

Please review the following Server Migration Documentation, and let us know if you still have any unanswered questions:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/Tivoli+Endpoint+Manager/page/Server+Migration

If performed correctly, you should absolutely be able to maintain your existing custom content, operators, actions, etc…after the migration.

Also, regarding physical vs. virtual, I’d suggest reviewing the Performance & Capacity planning guide as it provides a lot of good insight and recommendations on the subject:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/Tivoli%20Endpoint%20Manager/page/Performance%20&%20Capacity%20Planning

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I would also like to comment…

  1. Review this thread.
  2. We have under 15K endpoints running on a VM and have no issues (we have a great VI, so that obviously makes or breaks you).
  3. If you are going through the effort, you may be better off going to Windows Server 2016.
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Pay special attention to disk I/O requirements. We ended up going physical with RAID 10 arrays as our SAN storage wasn’t sufficient.

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This is a complicated question to answer and really depends on how many endpoints and operators you expect to have.

The biggest bottleneck with bigfix that is the hardest to solve is DiskIO for the databases and FillDB.

The other consideration is that it is ideal to have a large cache for files uploaded to the root server or downloads from the web. This cache does not have significant IO requirements in the same way as the databases or FillDB so it does not need to be on equally fast storage, but it could be if you wanted.

If you run a BigFix VM with extremely fast dedicated storage, that would generally be better than running a physical server with slow disks.

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