Upgraded to 7.2.4.60 this past weekend

(imported topic written by StacyLee)

Just thought I would let everyone know I upgraded our deployment from 7.0.9.164 to 7.2.4.60 this past saturday (8/8).

The upgrade went reletively smoothly, here are some notes and observations:

Deployment Facts: 2 Main BES Servers (DSA), 1 Stand Alone Web Reports Server, 18 Relays, All servers are Windows Server 2008 x64 (all but the main servers are SP2)

  1. All upgrades were performed using the bigfix console upgrade fixlets.

  2. The main server upgraded suprisingly fast about 10-15 minutes. One thing I like about manual upgrade is to be able to watch the progress opposed to praying something is happening. I used to this the first couple of upgrades but since trying the fixlets I have never gone back to manual. What I do launch tasks manager and watch for the upgrade processes to spawn and wait till it dissappears. Once the upgrade process dissappears, i go to the BF directories and check the files version s to verify they are updated and services are running. The next check is launching the upgraded console and connecting.

  3. The 2nd DSA server never upgraded via the fixlet. I waited over 30 mins and even restarted the client services. When I finally checked the logs I saw it was constantly checking itself for the upgrade file but kept showing up as false and would not download from BigFix or from it’s peer server (already upgraded and with the files cached on it). I eventually downloaded the file manually and ran the upgrade exe on the server and it finally upgraded.

  4. Since I was in a mainteance window I wanted to get the relays upgraded quickly. I kicked off the “TROUBLESHOOTING: Restart the BES Relay Service” on all relays to refresh their services and make the relays notice the upgraded BES Servers. They did come back and I kicked off the relay upgrade fixlet and had them all upgraded within about 15 minutes.

  5. MAC Client upgrades: I kicked off the MAC upgrade fixlet first Updated Mac OS X BES Client Now Available! (Version 7.2.2.38) - they started and everything was going smoothingly

  6. Windows Clients upgrades: Taget all computers as recommended and the upgrades started rolling out as expected.

  7. I kept an eye on the upgrades throughout the day and noted at the 8 hour mark we had approximately 8500 clients updated which works out to 1062 clients per hour (~18 clients per minute). Pretty good given it was a Saturday and most machines were offline at the time. As it stands today over 16,000 clients have been updated, the remaining ones are offline or still pending check in. The way I look it I will probably never see 100% but these numbers are about 70% of our client so far.

  8. I noticed there finally was a export to PDF fixlet available for Win 2008. I ran part one which completed 100% and restarted. I ran part to and it complete all tasks except for the last part which seemed to be stuck running a reg action. I let it sit for a while then finally restarted the server and it showed up as failed. I am guessing it maybe due to it not recognizing the x64 reg hive. I submitted a ticket with the errors on Saturday and am still waiting to hear back. This will be a good win for us to have this resolved.

hint

hint

Overall everything seems to be running smooth and finally some of the power trend reports are working in 7.2 web reports that didn’t work with 7.0 webreports. I don’t notice much a performance difference (not sure if I should) but I am glad the ugprade is complete and am up to spec with the latest BES version.

Thanks

Stacy

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Stacy,

A quick note on #8. We noticed this was updated to support win2k8 earlier in the week and went ahead and deployed. We had no issues with the second task. Our environment is different than yours though. BES server and Web Reports are on same server. And we also have SP2 on the box.

John

(imported comment written by StacyLee)

are you running x64 server 08’ ?

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Thanks for the notes Stacy… We are always trying to tell people that we consider BigFix upgrades relatively easy compared to most products they use and people are always skeptical (it seems they have had bad experiences with lots of products)… We are always referring people to posts like these that show real-world customers’ experiences…

Ben

(imported comment written by Shlomi91)

Hi,

also upgraded from 7.1.x to 7.2.4.60 last weekend, but due to having the database on a central DB server, had to manually upgrade the server.

all the rest of the process (relays / clients / web server) wend smoothly (about 4000 clients within 36 hours, over 200 sites with slow MPLS connection).

Shlomi

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

I was also very excited to see the new PDF update for 2008 (thanks BF) - which I did immediately and it was sucessful. I am running BES on 32bit though.

Mike

(imported comment written by peterd91)

Hey Stacy,

We did upgrade on exactly the same versions of BigFix and all went just fine, only that the agent upgrade fixlet shows Failed for the very last component in the Action Script Execution Detail section of the action. The action status shows Fixed, though. It’s exactly the same as described in this post: http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?pid=14726#p14726

I deployed the above fixlet on two separate platforms both upgraded from 7.0.9.164 to 7.2.4.60 and got the same issue.

Anyone else noticed this in the status of his agent upgrade action?

P.S. we do not have any non-Windows agents in our deployment

Thanks,

Peter

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Stacy Lee

are you running x64 server 08’ ?

Yes, BES server and web reports on same x64 server 08. The SQL database is on a remote server but the same platform - x64 server 08.

John