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Installation Guide
Learn the system requirements, licensing and installation instructions, and how to configure and maintain BigFix.
Types of installation
Before you install the product, decide if you want to do an evaluation or production installation.
Evaluation installation
When you run the evaluation installation, you do not need to buy any license files from HCL. The evaluation installation configures BigFix as a Try and Buy product, so you can try it first and buy a license later.

Installation Guide
Learn the system requirements, licensing and installation instructions, and how to configure and maintain BigFix.
- Introduction
  BigFix aims to solve the increasingly complex problem of keeping your critical systems updated, compatible, and free of security issues. It uses patented Fixlet technology to identify vulnerable computers in your enterprise. With just a few mouse-clicks you can remediate them across your entire network from a central console.
- BigFix Platform Unicode Support Overview
  BigFix Platform V10 gathers data from BigFix clients deployed with different code pages and languages, encode the data into UTF-8 format, and report it back to the BigFix server.
- Sample deployment scenarios
  The following deployment scenarios illustrate some basic configurations taken from actual case studies.
- Requirements and assumptions
  BigFix runs efficiently using minimal server, network, and client resources.
- Types of installation
  Before you install the product, decide if you want to do an evaluation or production installation.
  - Evaluation installation
    When you run the evaluation installation, you do not need to buy any license files from HCL. The evaluation installation configures BigFix as a Try and Buy product, so you can try it first and buy a license later.
  - Production installation
    If you purchased a license from HCL, you can perform a production installation.
  - Moving from evaluation installation to production installation
    You can install and configure a BigFix environment in evaluation mode and later decide to upgrade the environment to production by converting the evaluation license to production without reinstalling the entire environment.
- Managing licenses
  You must obtain a license key before you can install and use BigFix.
- Before installing
  Before running the installation make sure that you read the following topics and run the requested activities if needed.
- Installing on Windows systems
  Now that you understand the terms and the administrative roles, you are ready to get authorized and install the programs.
- Installing on Linux systems
  After understanding the terms and the administrative roles, you are ready to actually get authorized and install the programs.
- Installing the clients
  Install the BigFix client on every computer in your network that you want to administer, including the computer that is running the console.
- BigFix Administration Tool
  The BigFix Administration Tool, also called BESAdmin, is the tool we use to perform configuration changes and maintenance operations.
- Post-installation configuration steps
  After having run the installation, make sure that you read the following topics and run the requested activities if needed.
- Managing relays
  Relays can significantly improve the performance of your installation.
- Introduction to Tiny Core Linux - BigFix Virtual Relay
  Follow the step-by-step sequence of operations needed to build the virtual machine, from the downloading of the ISO image to the complete setup and configuration of the BigFix Virtual Relay.
- Setting up a proxy connection
  If your enterprise uses a proxy to access the Internet, your BigFix environment can use that communication path to gather content from sites.
- Running backup and restore
  You can schedule periodic backups (typically nightly) of the BigFix server and database files, to reduce the risk of losing productivity or data when a problem occurs by restoring the latest backup.
- Upgrading on Windows systems
  Before you begin
- Upgrading on Linux systems
  Before you begin
- SQL Server parallelism optimization
  The performance of an SQL Server database instance can often be improved by small tweaks. Performance might also be hindered by simple oversights. In fact, some SQL Server parallelism settings have suboptimal default values. Moreover, they have to be re-tuned after an hardware upgrade. Other issues might arise from inadvertent hardware configurations, especially when SQL Server is hosted on a virtual machine (VM).
- Known limitations and workarounds
  This section describes the known limitations and possible workarounds.
- Logging
  This section describes the log files associated with the BigFix components.
- Uninstalling the BigFix client
  To uninstall the BigFix client installed on the various operating systems, see the following sections.

Evaluation installation

When you run the evaluation installation, you do not need to buy any license files from HCL. The evaluation installation configures BigFix as a Try and Buy product, so you can try it first and buy a license later.

The trial product has the following limitations:

A license expiration of 30 days
A license allocation of 1000 clients
A predefined set of allowed sites. You can enable the desired sites after completing the evaluation installation.

When you install BigFix in evaluation mode, the installation wizard collects the information required to request an evaluation BigFix license to HCL, and creates an evaluation masthead that entitles your organization to use BigFix. You must specify the correct data which is needed if you want to convert your server evaluation license into a production license.

You must generate the license on a machine with network connectivity. You can then use this evaluation license the same way you would use a production license.

If you are generating an evaluation license for a server that is located in an airgapped environment, stop the current installation and copy the generated license.crt and license.pvk files from the local machine to the isolated server. Restart the installation on that server by choosing type "Production" and selecting the files you copied previously.

After an Evaluation installation, a user named EvaluationUser is created to log on both the BigFix console and BigFix Web Reports.

If you need an evaluation time longer than 30 days, contact the sales support to arrange a limited production license.

It is possible to convert the evaluation installation to a production installation. For additional information see Moving from evaluation installation to production installation.

Note: The evaluation installation does not support the enhanced security option. For more information about this feature, see Security Configuration Scenarios.

Note: A supported version of Microsoft SQL Server must be installed on the system prior to launching the evaluation installation.