Hi Everyone, I just wanted to share some information that may assist others in the future while upgrading Beacon versions if you use Service Accounts instead of the Local System Account.
I triggered an update this morning using the "Beacon Version Approved for Use" drop down in the Settings page of the FNMS Console. We use the Cloud version of the FNMS environment and currently have 5 Beacons located around the Globe. For the Flexnet Beacon Engine Service, we leverage a Service Account versus the Local System Account as the "Log on as" User for the Service.
From previous experience and as identified in the documentation, after an Automated Beacon upgrade, the "Log on as" User is set to the default of Local System. On a previous Auto Beacon upgrade that I did I simply left the "Log on as" User as our Service Account and the upgrade progressed as expected and completed successfully and did indeed set the "Log on as" User to the System Account which I simply updated with our Service Account afterwards.
So, this morning I took the same approach as above, leaving the "Log on as" User as our Service Account and triggered the Auto upgrade. This time the upgrade did not progress as expected, the Activity log indicated the upgrade had started and stopped the Beacon Service, however, the Beacon Service did not start again as expected . I waited 30 minutes and then logged onto each Beacon Server to look at the Beacon Engine Logs. When I opened the "Services" tab from the Administrative Tools and looked at the Flexnet Beacon Engine Service .. the Service was stopped as indicated in the Activity Log. I changed the "Log on as" User to the Local System Account and restarted the Service. After making the change of Users, the upgrade was again triggered and completed as expected about 20 minutes later. As identified above, once the upgrade completed, I went back to each Beacon and changed the "Log on as" User back to our Service Account.
Lessons learned from my new experience (and perhaps one of the Flexera experts can confirm my assumption on this) if you use Service Accounts instead of the Local System Account for the Flexnet Beacon Engine .. its best to change the "Log on as" User to Local System prior to performing the Auto upgrade process to avoid the process from stopping, where we as the Admin must intervene and switch the "Log on as" User.
I did perform the Auto upgrade in our UAT environment, however, one Beacon worked ok but the other didn't and I had to make the same User swap as indicated above to get that one to complete as well.
I apologize for the length of the post but wanted to provide all of the details in case someone else runs into a similar situation.
