Additional considerations

To ensure that no problems occur while working with coexisting servers, review the following considerations and apply them to your environment.

Software catalogs

To ensure that software on your computers is discovered based on the same software signatures, upload the same software catalogs to both servers. You can then disable the catalog delivery on one of them to avoid overwriting. The remaining server will deliver the catalog to all computers, regardless of the server that they report to, because the computers are in the same Fixlet site.

To disable the catalog delivery, run the following query on the database: 
UPDATE DBO.SYSTEM_GLOBALS SET VALUE = '--- false
' WHERE NAME='catalog_download_actions_enabled';
Note: Consider the following limitation only if you initially installed BigFix Inventory version 9.2.3 or earlier, regardless of whether you upgraded to a newer version since:

Use the same database software for both servers, either DB2 or SQL Server. Signatures are different between these two types, and one software catalog might cause problems with discovery.

VM managers

You can use the user interface to add VM managers only for one of the servers, namely the one that has the BigFix server assigned to it. This is because VM managers added in the user interface must be managed by the VM Manager Tool that is installed on the BigFix server. For the other server, you can use advanced VM management, in which you install additional tools on any computer.

Changing assignments

If you want to change a computer assignment, for example from BFI1 to BFI2, ensure that you edit the existing setting instead of creating a new one. To edit the setting, complete the following steps:
  1. In the BigFix console, click Computers.
  2. Right-click a single computer, and then click Edit Computer Settings.
  3. Select the Instance setting, click Edit, and specify a new value.

Missing scan results

Missing scan results might occur after changing the assignments of your computers. Such a change is not always detected by the server, which as a result does not upload the scan results. To correct this issue, you must reinstall the scanner and rerun the scans. After you do this, the old scan results are deleted, and the new ones are collected and uploaded. To reinstall the scanner, complete the following steps:
  1. In the BigFix console, stop all actions that are running on the problematic endpoints.
  2. Open the Fixlet site.
  3. From Fixlets and Tasks, select Uninstall Scanner, and click Take Action.
  4. Select all problematic computers, and click OK. Wait until the action is complete.
  5. Reinstall the scanner and rerun the scans. For more information, see: Setting up scans.