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Installation Guide
Learn the system requirements, licensing and installation instructions, and how to configure and maintain BigFix.
Upgrading on Windows systems
Before you begin
Upgrade prerequisite checks
The following prerequisite checks are automatically run by the upgrade procedure on the BigFix Server. If any of these checks fails, the upgrade does not start and the procedure exits with an error message.

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.
- 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
  - BigFix client backward compatibility
    Before upgrading the BigFix server to Version 10, ensure that it is at Version 9.5.10 or later.
  - Upgrade paths for BigFix 10
    The following tables describe the upgrade paths to BigFix 10:
  - Before upgrading
    Perform these steps before upgrading the BigFix components:
  - Upgrade prerequisite checks
    The following prerequisite checks are automatically run by the upgrade procedure on the BigFix Server. If any of these checks fails, the upgrade does not start and the procedure exits with an error message.
  - Automatic upgrade
    You can proceed with an automatic upgrade using the "BigFix - Updated Platform Server Components version x.x.x Now Available!" Fixlet.
  - Manual upgrade
    Use the manual upgrade instead of the Fixlet upgrade when you upgrade a DSA multiple server environment or a BigFix server which uses a remote database, or a BigFix environment having remote WebUI or remote Web Reports server.
  - Rollback
    If you made a recovery copy of your BigFix Server data and configuration as described in Platform/Installation/c_backup_procedure_windows.html#c_backup_procedure, you can roll back your BigFix Server to its original status, before running the upgrade, following the instructions provided in Platform/Installation/c_recovery_procedure.html#c_recovery_procedure.
- 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.

Upgrade prerequisite checks

The following prerequisite checks are automatically run by the upgrade procedure on the BigFix Server. If any of these checks fails, the upgrade does not start and the procedure exits with an error message.

You can rerun the upgrade after you ensure that the condition that failed is satisfied. The upgrade procedure checks that:

The size of the Upload Manager Buffer Directory and the number of files that it contains do not exceed the 90% of the values that are specified in the following settings:
```
_BESRelay_UploadManager_BufferDirectoryMaxSize
_BESRelay_UploadManager_BufferDirectoryMaxCount
```
If the check fails: Fix the issue by running the following Fixlets available in the BES Support site, and then rerun the upgrade:
```
2695: WARNING: Upload Manager Directory exceeds file max number - BES Server
2696: WARNING: Upload Manager Directory Full - BES Server
```
The site names listed in the following columns of the database contain only ASCII characters:
```
LOCAL_OBJECT_DEFS.Name 
LOCAL_OBJECT_DEFS.Sitename
```
If the check fails: Rename the site names and fix the content referencing them.
The size of the data related to custom content and the actions that are contained in the ACTION_DEFS.Fields and LOCAL_OBJECT_DEFS.Fields fields does not exceed the maximum size allowed in the new database schema.
If the check fails: Shorten the exceeding data length.
The data contained in each of the following fields does not exceed the maximum index length:
```
DASHBOARDDATA.NAME
UNMANAGEDASSET_FIELDS_TYPES.FIELDNAME
WEBUI_DATA.NAME
```
If the check fails: Shorten the data contained in the fields as required.

Run these steps, if you are in a DSA environment and any of the prerequisite checks fails on the primary server, which is the first server that is upgraded:

Run the needed corrective actions on the primary server.
Wait for a full replica on the secondary servers to ensure that the same corrective actions are applied to their databases as well.
After the full replica completes, rerun the upgrade on the primary server and then on the secondary servers.