Client Management Suite

I'm currently on version 7.5 where SIM is offering me either 7.6 or 8.0.  Has anyone been in this situation and went straight to 8.0 or is it recommended to go to 7.6 first then 8?  I'm guessing 8.0 is too "bleeding edge" at the moment but was curious whether anyone's taken the plunge and is running ITMS 8.0 right now.  Would appreciate any feedback on major "gotchas" and issues that have come up for me to get a sense of whether I should upgrade to 8.0 or not.  Thanks in advance!

Hi Clint,

you can check this KB where is information from which version you can directly upgrade to 8.0 release

• https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.DOC9160.html

Thanks,

IP.

I asked earlier for others experience with the upgrade to 8.0.  Didnt get a lot of feed back here, but in talking to Symantec and our Partner, from what I have been able to tell, the upgrade to 8 is pretty smooth.

Some have said that 8.0 is more stable than 7.6.

We have our upgrade scheduled for the week of May 23rd so we are coming up on it pretty quick.  You will have to be on 7.5 HF5 or newer to upgrade straight to 8.  

Hello All,

Don't upgrade, wait for ITMS 8.0 Hot Fix 2 or 3, they are a lot of issues in the lateset releases, plus, some products are droppped, so yo need to read carfully the release ntoes, finally, find the below link.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/it-management-suite-80-hf1-now-available

Good Luck

I can't recommend any GOTCHA's, as I've been sitting on 7.1 for a while :(.  You don't want to fall to far behind many releases behind.

I would go to 7.6 and waiting till there is further HF for 8.0.  If you don't have a development environment, I highly recommend to review the new features and changes before upgrading, so you are more comfortable.

As always read the release notes, known issues section. 

I have installed ITMS 8.0 about 20 times now. No major issues. Feel free to ask any questions if you like.

I understand that pcAnywhere's going away from 7.6 and Bomgar will be replacing it but after upgrading my test VM from 7.5 to 7.6, don't see Bomgar anything in the console.  My pcAnywhere Settings page looks a little goofy as the browser isn't filling in all of the graphic tiles so I'm guessing pcA isn't functional anymore.  This was one of the reasons why I didn't want to upgrade because I heard that Bomgar has a concurrent connection limit unlike pcA and no integration with the console

So what are my next steps to get Bomgar working in 7.6 and will it require a separate server?  Does going to 8.0 instead offer a smoother and integrated experience?  I need to support Windows 10 now so that's why I can't stay at 7.5.

We are currently moving from 7.1 to 7.6, a complete rebuild as 7.1 is in such a mess.  Once we are happy the plan is then to run with an inplace upgrade to 8 and hopefully there will be a few hotfixes out by then.

We did consider going straight to V8 but it had only just been released when the project got signed off so decided against it as it was an initial release.  Anything with better agent health monitoring has got to be a plus though.

We completed our upgrade last week.

I ran into two issues.  The first is likely unique to us.

1)  The install completed but we ran into problems during the configuration.  A critical error occured.  We had to reconfigure each solution and then where missing tables and stored procedures.  After working through each of the config files, we were able to piece together the SQL that didnt run to address those issues.

2)  There is a bug in 7.6 that was fixed in later releases of 7.6 but did not get addressed in 8.0.  The Update Network Location Resource task will remove the location association to your device if the location does not have a matching subnet assigned.  We had 15,000 devices without a location.  Luckily we had another system that had the same information and we were able to restore from that.  So if you assign locations, make sure to disable that task until you get a fix from Symantec.

Everything else has gone great for us.  Less than 50 actively communicating agents to upgrade.  It is usually a few weeks before I get to that level.  The new agent provides a wealth of information that we previously didnt have when checking agent health.  Over all performance seems to be a little better.

Follow the Symantec checklists for upgrades, make sure you have good backups.  Throttle back all agent communication.  We default to a 2 hour agent checkin period, we bumped it up to 12 hours before the upgrade.

Disable inventory for a couple of days.  

Slow upgrade your agents, I can send you the filters we created to only allow X number of clients to update at once.  As more get updated and you dont see any issues you can slowly start to increase the numbers as well as slowly decrease your agent check in.

I gotta say, even given the issues we had, this was by far the smoothest upgrade we have had yet.

Gee...filled in a form on Bomgar's website requesting for more info but have yet to hear from them.  I vaguely remember a few people mentioning that there may be some flexibility in having more than just the 2 free perpetual licenses based upon your SMP node count.  True/False?

In the meantime, anyone else see https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.HOWTO110286.html that outlines restoring pcAnywhere functionality in ITMS 7.6 and can comment on this procedure?