FlexNet Manager Suite on prem agents - 2 different version of agents on one device

[penny_cundro]

Can you have 2 versions of agents running on one device?  We created a new prod environment with new beacons.  Can we have an old agent running updating the old prod environment beacons (current prod) and have a new agent running that will point to the new prod beacons?   

[SinghJ]

I dont think the agent will work like that. When agent collect the information. Agent can't decide the beacon. its some backend process which decide the beacon... correct me if I am wrong .. and we can't install two agents on same machine. 

[penny_cundro]

The backend process is the mgssetup.ini file in which the policy points to the Beacon that it needs to reach out to.  Why can't you point to 2 Beacons?  Btw this would just be a temporary solution so when we are ready to go to the new prod it would already have the devices with the new agent.   (while it would be also updating the current prod with the old agent) Once we would go over to the new prod environment, we would then uninstall the old agent.

[mfranz]

The mgssetup.ini is actually just for the initial setup (bootstrapping). Once the agent successfully contacted a Beacon and updated its settings, it is "aware" of all Beacons. It will then "decide" which Beacon to contact on a case-by-case basis. For this decision it has multiple algorithms, if you want to read about it, search for NetSelector or MgsPing.

[cdubs76]

Agreed.  The way i read the post was this is two seperate environments they are wanting the agent to report to.  That's how i read it---OLD Prod and NEW Prod.  If they're in the same environment, then yeah, the agent would know about both of them.  

[SinghJ]

Thank you for confirming that its agent who can decide the Beacon! Bootstrapping is use for initial setup. 

It's all about balancing the load between Beacon !!

[cdubs76]

The agent cannot have two different versions running (installation of new agent will update the older version), however, to accomplsh what you want, you can let the automated scheduled tasks write take care of uploading to prod beacons....and then set up a scheduled task and feed it the parameters for "UploadLocation=https://oldbeacon.domain.com/ManagesoftRL" or something like that  and have the same agent write to two different locations.

[SinghJ]

Agree, when installing the latest version it can update the new one and we can use uploadlocation = Beaconsever/managesoftRL to decide the beacon. Hope this will help him !!