FlexNet Agent Change in Beacon

[Kimberly_snyder]

We have a customer who is moving from one FNMS instance to another and will be changing beacon servers as well and have a question regarding the agents currently installed. What is the best method to repoint the agent to the new beacon?

[tkuivala]

Hi Kimberly!

You can change the application server of the old beacon to the new application server, this should make sure that all agents will know both beacons.

Once you are fairly confident that all agents have updated their policy, you can delete the old beacon. You can also create an A record just to divert any strays to the new beacon.

Make sure that the new beacons FQDN is resolvable by all clients prior to deleting the old one however.

Would this approach work for you?

[mfranz]

Hi Kimberly,

There are multiple possible approaches. Goal of most of them is to create a transition phase for the agents to catch up with the changes in the infrastructure. Here are two:

1. Keep existing Beacons and integrate them into the new environment until all clients have fetched updated policies & settings. Then remove the old Beacons.
2. Provide the agents with additional download and upload locations before switiching to the new environment. Then when the switch happens, every client should have the data to connect with the new Beacons. This can be accomplished by adding "fake" Beacon data to the Beacon_MT table, so they are distributed to all existing Beacons and Agents. Of course, it only makes sense if you already have names and protocols of the future Beacons.

Alternatively, you could push the new Beacon details to all machines registries via script, after the new environment went live.

Best regards,

Markward

[ChrisG]

One strategy which can be useful in some scenarios is to deactivate an old beacon and the configure a DNS entry pointing the old beacon's name to the new beacon's IP address. This will allow existing agents using the old beacon's name to get to the new beacon with one single centrally managed change.