Standing up new FNMS environment - legacy agent question.

[craig_moore]

We have an existing FNMS 2018 implementation with ~5,000 agents deployed through the environment connecting to a couple of beacons.

Client now wants to stand up a new FNMS 2019 R2 environment on new hardware.

My question is what would be the recommendation to get the servers where old agent deployed to report into the new environment.  We have had problems trying to reconfigure agent to point to new environment especially with Windows and we are thinking the best approach might be to uninstall the old agent and redeploy the new agent pointing to the new environment.

Please advise.

Thanks

Craig

[jasonlu]

Craig,

For a single server FNMS system, converting to a new single server FNMS system, I've had success with the following process:

1) Stand up the new FNMS infrastructure

2) on the old FNMS infrastructure, extract a report showing what existing legacy agents are out there. Use this for tracking.

3) Uninstall the old FNMS infrastructure, and install a beacon on the old batch server. Make it a child of the new FNMS infrastructure.

4) In the new FNMS infrastructure, track which of the legacy agents are reporting in, against the report from step 2. Legacy agents will obtain the updated policy from the new FNMS infrastructure, together with the new parent beacon location.

5) Once all or most of the agents have reported in, disable (but don't delete) the child beacon so that agents cannot report to it.

6) Track which agents continue to report in (they will now be sending their data to the parent), and follow up with those that are no longer reporting. Most likely its firewall issues to the new FNMS.

7) Turn off the child beacon once all or most of the agents are reporting.

As you've got multiple beacons in the legacy infrastructure already, you could just reconfigure those to point to the new infrastructure. I've done this as well, and it works fine.

I've also performed the uninstall/reinstall of the agents for the same effect, but I you may have to deal with more change requests with this. If you are upgrading agents at the same time, then this would make sense.

j

[AamerSharif]

Hi Craig,

There are multiple way you can achieve this, 

One option to achieve this with minimum effort. I am assuming old inventory agent must be uploading to beacon and inventory beacon will uploading to FNMS 2018 environment (that is going to be deprecated if understood correctly). if you don't need 2018 R2 beacons you can 

1. Connect/Register your existing beacon/s with new  FNMS 2019 R2 environment
2. Inventory agent will keep on uploading data to those inventory beacon/s as agent are already doing
3. Inventory beacon/s will start uploading data to new FNMS 2019 R2 environment
4. Now you can upgrade your existing inventory beacon/s to new FNMS 2019 R2 and also inventory agents
   
   If you like to feed inventory data to old environment to old FNMS 2018 environment as well, you can turn on inventory file replication in the new inventory server and using script to move replicated inventory files to old FNMS 2018 inventory server (it mean now you can feed the inventory data to both environment until you have complete transition to FNMS 2019 R2)
   Hope this will help to have this transition simple and smooth and also provide up-to-date license position during this transition.
   
   Cheers
   Aamer