Home
Installation Guide
Learn the system requirements, licensing and installation instructions, and how to configure and maintain BigFix.
Upgrading on Windows systems
Before you begin
Manual upgrade
How to manually upgrade BigFix Platform components.
Upgrading the secondary server
How to manually upgrade the secondary BigFix server or any additional BigFix server.

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
    How to manually upgrade BigFix Platform components.
    - Upgrading the installation generator and the primary server
      From the computer where you installed the BigFix Installation Generator, perform these steps.
    - Upgrading the secondary server
      How to manually upgrade the secondary BigFix server or any additional BigFix server.
      - Upgrading a BigFix server with a remote database
        The upgrade Fixlet in the Support site does not upgrade a remote server correctly. Run the full BigFix server installer to perform the upgrade.
    - Upgrading the Console
      How to upgrade the BigFix Console.
    - Upgrading the WebUI
      Procedure to upgrade the WebUI.
    - Upgrading the relays
      To upgrade the BigFix from the BigFix console, apply the Updated Windows Relay Fixlet to all relevant relays.
    - Upgrading the clients
      You can upgrade the BigFix Clients by copying the BigFix Client installation folder to each computer that is running the BigFix Client, and then running setup.exe.
    - Upgrading the Web Reports server
      To upgrade a stand-alone Web Reports server on Windows, copy the BigFix Server installation folder to the Web Reports Server computer. The default location of the BigFix Server installation folder is %PROGRAM FILES%\BigFix Enterprise\BES Installers\Server. Run the BigFix-BES-Server setup.exe, which detects the Web Reports installation and offers to upgrade it for you.
  - 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.

Upgrading the secondary server

How to manually upgrade the secondary BigFix server or any additional BigFix server.

Upgrading the secondary/additional server

You can upgrade the BigFix secondary server by copying the BigFix Server installer folder to the remote computer that is running the BigFix Server, replacing the file masthead.afxm in the installer folder with the updated masthead, and then running setup.exe.

Copy the BigFix Server installer folder to the remote BigFix Server computer. The default location of the BigFix Server installer folder is %PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\BigFix Enterprise\BES Installers\Server.
Note: If you have a remote database, prior to upgrading see Upgrading a BigFix server with a remote database.
Replace the file masthead.afxm in the installer folder with the current deployment masthead. The replacement file can be downloaded from https://servername:port/masthead/masthead.afxm or copied from the BigFix Server computer, where it is named ActionSite.afxm and saved in the folder %PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\BigFix Enterprise\BES Server. After placing the new file in the installer folder, ensure it is named masthead.afxm, renaming it if necessary.
Run the BigFix Server installer (setup.exe) on the BigFix Server computer.
Note: Before starting to upgrade, the upgrade procedure runs a set of prerequisite checks. If any of them fails, you can do the required corrective actions and then rerun the upgrade procedure. For more information, see Upgrade prerequisite checks.
Follow the installer instructions to upgrade.
Run the Administration Tool BESAdmin.exe to distribute the updated license.

Note:

Before upgrading, it is advisable to delete or rename the server_audit.log file to avoid inaccurate interpretation of file encoding.
The License Key Password cannot contain double quotes and cannot be longer than 35 characters.