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Installation Guide
Learn the system requirements, licensing and installation instructions, and how to configure and maintain BigFix.
Requirements and assumptions
BigFix runs efficiently using minimal server, network, and client resources.
Server requirements

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 V9.5 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. Your organization might look similar to one of the examples below, depending on the size of your network, the various bandwidth restrictions between clusters and the number of relays and servers. The main constraint is not CPU power, but bandwidth.
- Requirements and assumptions
  BigFix runs efficiently using minimal server, network, and client resources.
  - Server requirements
  - Console requirements
  - Client requirements
    To find the latest information about the client requirements, see Platform/Installation/c_spcr_platform.html.
  - Database requirements
    The database stores all the data retrieved from the clients. Before installing the BigFix server, ensure that the database requirements are met.
  - Security requirements
    The system authenticates all Fixlets and actions using secure public-key infrastructure (PKI) signatures. PKI uses public/private key pairs to ensure authenticity.
  - Network configuration requirements
    The following network configuration is recommended for security and performance reasons:
  - Assumptions
    The process of getting the BigFix up and running varies, depending on your network environment and your security policies.
- 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
- Upgrading on Linux systems
- 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

Server requirements

To find the latest information about the server requirements, see Detailed system requirements.

Notes about Windows operating systems:

Starting from V9.2 Patch 3, only the 64-bit architecture is supported for installing the BigFix server and Web Reports components on Windows systems.
The Windows firewall can be either turned off or configured to open the following two ports:
- Port 52311 for UDP and TCP/IP
- Port 8083 for Web Reports and TCP/IP
User Account Control on Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 must be disabled or lowered so that services that do not run as LOCAL SYSTEM are not interfered with by the User Account Control pop-up messages.
Windows BigFix servers cannot be migrated to Linux BigFix servers.
Since the May 2023 WebUI update, the WebUI component can be installed on Windows Server 2016 or Windows Server 2019.

Notes about Linux operating systems:

IBM DB2 10.5 / V11.5 GA / 11.5.4 / 11.5.5 / 11.5.6 / 11.5.7 / 11.5.8 / 11.5.9. For information about how to install DB2 server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 64-bit see Installing and configuring DB2.
Red Hat packages required by BigFix Linux server and Web Reports components:
- cyrus-sasl-lib.x86_64
- libstdc++.x86_64 and all their prerequisites
- pam.x86_64
- krb5-libs.x86_64
- unixODBC.x86_64
- fontconfig.x86_64 (Web Reports only)
- libXext.x86_64 (Web Reports only)
- libXrender.x86_64 (Web Reports only)
- zlib.x86_64 (Web Reports only)
- libpng12.x86_64 (RHEL 7 only)
- numactl.x86_64 (embedded DB2 installations only)
- pam.i686 (embedded DB2 installations only)
- libstdc++.i686 (embedded DB2 installations only)
For the Red Hat 6 operating system, it is recommended to install unixODBC package version higher than 2.2.14.
Since the May 2023 WebUI update, the WebUI component can be installed only on Red Hat Linux 8 (64-bit).

Minimum disk space requirements to install BigFix server and Web Reports on Linux:

BigFix Server: 400MB; DB2: 1GB (6GB recommended)
BigFix Web Reports: 200MB; DB2: 700MB

This is the disk space used in each file system for installing the server components:

160 MB in /var
240 MB in /opt

This is the disk space used in each file system for installing the Web Reports components:

170 MB in /var/opt/BESWebReportsServer
30 MB in /opt/BESWebReportsServer