Before upgrading

Perform these steps before upgrading the BigFix components:

  1. Ensure that the BigFix WebUI service is stopped before starting to upgrade the BigFix components, and do not start it again until the overall upgrade procedure completes successfully.
  2. Close all BigFix consoles.
  3. Back up your BigFix server and database as described in Server Backup.
  4. Back up your license.pvk, license.crt, and masthead.afxm to a separate location on the BigFix server or to a USB key.
  5. Ensure that you have enough free space for the BigFix database. The free space projection involves a number of factors: the row counts of specific tables, the density of the data pages storing the tables and indexes, and specific database options for log management and table compression. The basic consideration for the 9.5 upgrade is to ensure that you can accommodate a 100% growth in the size of the database (twice its current size) if upgrading from V9.2. The additional space is required to manage the growth of tables for UTF-8 transcoding, including the allocation of temporary space for the movement of data within the BigFix databases. You can determine the database size through the get_dbsize_info procedure.
  6. If your server is configured in a DSA environment, increase the replication interval to prevent the replication from failing repeatedly during the upgrade. For more information, see Changing the replication interval on Linux systems.
  7. Upgrade the BigFix components in the following order:
    1. Servers and consoles. The console and the server must have the same version and must be upgraded at the same time.
    2. Relays
    3. Clients
    Servers, relays, and clients do not need to match versions and the upgrade of these components can occur at different times. Clients with earlier versions can continue to report to later versions of relays or servers, but might not have all the functionality of the later release.
    Note: Existing BigFix proxy configurations are automatically migrated to the V9.5 proxy configuration settings and behavior. For more information about BigFix V9.5 proxy configuration settings, see Setting up a proxy connection.
  8. In a DSA environment run the BigFix Server upgrade on the primary server first. Then upgrade the secondary servers.
Note:
  • For large deployments, the server upgrade might take several minutes.
  • After upgrading, you might initially experience a slower deployment. The upgrade downtime might create a backlog of client reports and it might take several hours for the BigFix server to process this backlog after the upgrade completed.
  • Check your password characters. After the upgrade, passwords containing non-ASCII characters are corrupted and users cannot log in anymore. In this case, before using the product, you must reset this type of password to either the same password or a new password without non-ASCII characters.