Recommended agent upgrade

[rohitupadhya]

Hi Dear Community,

While going through the documentation,  I discovered that there are 3 ways of upgrading an agent deployed on a server : 

• Give the Engineers the upgraded agent package to deploy the Flexnet agent into their system.
• Through the beacon application - Schedule a time and select the targeted system on which the upgrade has to be rolled out on.
• Use 3rd party channels - SCCM for Windows and RHEL Satellite Servers for Linux.

What does the community recommend we use to make a bulk upgrade to the Flexnet agent that may be deployed on thousands of machines? Also, are there any other ways using which the upgrade can be done?

I would also like to know the standard practice that Flexera users generally follow for rolling out the upgraded agent package for the case I have stated above.

Thank you,

rohitupadhya.

[dcollins]

It does depend on your situation, if you have the time to send people off to deploy it manually it brings benefits of confirmation 1-to-1 of successful installation but prone to human error.

the Beacon application does support deploying the agent but it does have limitations which SCCM may not, in particular when it comes to modifying registry entries that FNMS is unable to in its bootstrap answer file

SCCM, if available is usually the choice I would go for. While the FNMS method is good I think SCCM gives more flexibility as to what you can do with it, plus if it's on your network chances are its already a standardized process which will make it easier to deploy than using a new method altogether

However, a big benefit to the FNMS deployment, it supports multiple OS's.

I am not certain but I don't think SCCM supports all the systems the FNMS Agent supports

[adrian_ritz1]

Hi,

As @dcollins  advised, depend of your environment,  I have 20.00 workstation with agent installed and 10.000 server installed with agent, and I configured the beacon server to do the upgrade automatically. And we have all kind of servers, windows, aix, linux, you name it. Of course the upgrade will not work 100%, but I have a success rate of 95%, the rest of servers need to be investigated why they are not doing the automatic upgrade.

[dcollins]

That is, in fact, a big benefit to the FNMS deployment, it supports multiple OS's.

I am not certain but I dont think SCCM supports all the systems the FNMS Agent supports