Server Migration Advice

We will need to migrate our BigFix servers to new VMs in the next few months as Microsoft will end support of Server 2008/2008R2 in January 2020. I’m checking in to see if anyone has suggestions on the best way to do this for our environment.

All BigFix servers are VMs running Windows Server (running on VMware).

1 x Root Server
1 x DB Server (when we initially set up the system 5+ years ago, BigFix recommended a separate DB server if we were going to use VMs) - DB is MS SQL.
5 x relay servers (only 1 relay is physically outside of our network; the others were created to remove work from the Root Server)

Approximately 4000 endpoints, Windows and macOS

The Root, DB and 2 of the relays are running 2008 R2. The remaining relays are running 2012 R2. Based on that, I would lean towards replacing all of them with 2016 or 2019.

As we’re running 9.5.13, I’m guessing we could technically get rid of a couple of relays.

The only real documentation I found on IBM’s site basically said this is really complicated and open a ticket. I’m not even sure how to do that now that the product has moved to HCL.

Any advice / recommendations?

Keep your Relays.

The server migration process is fairly well documented. I did it from 2 Physical servers (DSA Pair) to 2 VM’s.
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/Tivoli+Endpoint+Manager/page/Server+Migration

As with you, we were running Windows 2008R2 and migrated to Windows 2016.

The next thing we needed to deal with was that our SQL Servers were 2008R2 as well and needed to be upgraded. To do this, we just shutdown all the BigFix services on the servers and our Data Base team upgraded the SQL servers in place on both servers.

NOTE: When we migrated the BigFix services, we installed SQL 2008R2 on the new servers then upgraded them after we migrated the BigFix information. This way we had no trouble re-attaching the databases to the “new” servers…