Hello, I’m preparing to upgrade our BigFix systems to the latest version to stay current. When I visit the download center I see that the current version is 9.2.
However I’ve been receiving emails regarding 9.5 and I see that 9.5 patch 2 is available.
We are currently on 9.2.0.363, upgraded back in November 2014. We are managing a mix of Windows 7 and Linux endpoints with BigFix.
Should we upgrade to 9.5 patch 2 or 9.2.7?
Upgrade to 9.5 Patch 2
That page is around for legacy purposes – on that page you’ll notice:
For the latest BigFix release information, visit http://support.bigfix.com/bes/release/.
Clicking that will bring you to the latest downloads
When I was at IBM, the advice was have a version n-1(For any tool).
Because this give us some grade of ‘security’, comparing to new releases(Which could have unknown bugs).
Of course, the risk is the same for every release, but I just wanted to give my opinion.
You could check the changes that the latest version offers and decide.
I agree @fermt, we follow the same n-1 concept for any tools and we have 9.5 patch 2 and you should be good to use that.
I generally recommend either going to the absolute newest release, which at this time would be 9.5.x (9.5.2.56) or the most up to date version of the previous release, which at this time would be 9.2.x (9.2.7.53)
Which option makes the most sense really depends on your environment. 9.5 brings unicode support which is a big change that could break some things, but it is also a feature that might be mandatory for some functionality you might find useful.
Awesome, thanks for the replies!
We plan to go from 9.2.3 to 9.2.7 ourselves soon and decided to use that as a step up to 9.5 after that. No need for Unicode support at the moment. Perhaps client versions can be a factor in deciding if they are not all at a 9.2.x version yet. Not sure if updating a pre-9.2 client to 9.5 will go without issues. We still got some 9.1 and 9.0 clients out there and they are not online often enough to update before the backend gets its update. 9.2 Patch 6 brought some significant changes as well (WebUI, for instance), giving us more reason to just take things to stable 9.2.7 first before making the plunge to 9.5.
Be aware, there is a issue with 9.5. The issue being that if you have computers that automatically populate Security Groups for software deployment in Big Fix they will start to disappear from the Big Fix Groups, however they are still in the AD Security Groups. This was just recently discovered.