Steps to follow while refreshing the Beacon OS

[winvarma]

Hi Forum,
We are doing OS refresh on all the servers and i'm thinking of starting with the Beacon OS upgrade to MS Windows 2019.
Request to suggest steps to be followed Pre and Post OS installation so that all the functionality of the Beacon is working as usual and agents are reporting normally.

We have only one beacon and do we have to setup a temporary beacon before we stop the existing beacon for the OS refresh purpose??

Please provide your thoughts and experiences.

Regards

[mfranz]

Hi,

Are you planning an in-place migration of the host OS on the existing machine? Or will you be provisioning a new VM?

Either way, you can easily run without a functional Beacon for a limited time. You won't get any data imports during that period, but most stuff should just catch up when the updated Beacon server goes live.

Best regards,

Markward

[adrian_ritz1]

Hi,

I would do the following, in case the host name of the beacon is not changed.

Secure the .flexconfig file that you used during the configuration of the beacon, if you don't have that file, it's fine, no problem, I think you can download this configuration file from WebUI

Secure the following registry key:

hkey_localmachine .... > Managesoft corp->mangagesoft->common->BeaconUID 

This key hold the beacon UID value, when you reinstall the beacon software this key is changed, and then you can't configure correctly the beacon whit the configuration file that you have.

After you have all this information secured, perform with the OS refresh, after finished, install again the beacon software, modify the reg key, and put the back the old value, import .flexconfig file or manually configure your beacon, with upload servers, etc.

Configure the password store

Recreate all SCCM imports, AD imports, etc, or other imports that are run from that beacon, i'm not sure on this part how to handle this topic.

I think the policy and vCenter inventory, or other inventory that are controlled centrally are downloaded with the policy that are gathered from the app server.

 If you do remote audit of the oracle server from beacon, again I'm not sure how to handle this.

And I think that's all.

[winvarma]

hi @mfranz,

most Probably we will be upgrading the OS on the existing Beacon and no New VM will be placed.

@adrian_ritz1 , Thanks for suggesting the precautions to be taken, before the OS is refreshed.

The main things we use in the Beacon are the inventory connections, Password store, and IIS.

Is there any way or possibility to take a backup of these settings and what are the places where in we can find the inventory connection settings stored.

Before os is upgrade we will any how take a snapshot of the Beacon though. 

This might be weird but just checking all possibilities as we will do these things very often.

regards