We have a migration upcoming and as part of migration we are copying servers from old DC to new DC.
it will be for 2 months.
We need endpoint from old DC reporting to console with hostname (abcd1111.domain1.com) and the copied server will be in new DC with same hostname (abdc1111.domain2.com) should also report to console.
at end of migraiton we will decomm old DC servers.
Will it be possible to have both DC servers to report to console? with same hostname and different DNS?
is there any best approach for this?
Yep, you can have the same hostname reporting into BigFix, because the client ID is what BigFix uses as identification.
computer id
That relevance will give you the UID of the agent. For example, in our environment we have cloud systems with the same hostnames, the same IP addresses, and even the same Active Directory structure, all reporting into the same console.
While it’s a bit of a nightmare to manage because there is no separation of projects on the endpoint level, the BigFix architecture is capable of managing said endpoints. Just pray you don’t get any requests to patch or modify just one of the 20 identical servers…
Thanks for response @mwolff .
But I read that, "if an endpoint reporting to console with an ID lets say 1 . and if one more endpoint with same host name reports with ID 2, the server with ID 1 will stop reporting "
is that true?
The BigFix agent is actually really clever in that way. If you clone a virtual and fire it up simultaneously as the original, you can watch the logs of the clone and it’ll read as something to the effect of
Duplicate found
Assigning new GUID
Full report evaluating
EDIT:
I just double checked, and I have several duplicate hostnames reporting into my BigFix environment. No issues with this base functionality at least, though if you have other processes to remove duplicate records that is solely based on hostname this could be an issue.
Agreed with above, you can literally have every machine in your BigFix console have the same PC name and be able to correctly communicate with them.
BigFix uses the IP to reach them and ties it to the client ID as mentioned.
We have the majority of our clients on different domains and run into name “collisions” from time to time, pushing patches out to PCA.domainA.com works and PCA.domainB.com does not get that fix.