Systems Deployment

If you have the time, do it. We were running 7.5 for a while, having success with some features and not others. We chose to upgrade to 8, used Symantec's instructions, and got nowhere. And their instructions basically have you uninstall your working Console server so be careful.

They have you back up certain files that you do need. But they claim that you just drop them in place and things will work. Not the case on my end. I wish I could tell you exactly what I did to get my resources and machines to carry over, but I don't really know. I got lots of errors, tried things over and over, and then it suddenly worked to the point where it would start with no errors and my machines came up. I lost some of the listings for configuration resources, but my machines were mostly what I was worried about.

The good news to this is that I only spent about 1 day getting everything back in order. Now that we've been online with 8 for about 2 months, some of the features I never got to work right are working great. And the reporting capabilities are realy helpful to. So, like I said, if you have the time to spend on it, do it. Give yourself a week dedicated to the project and by the end of that week, you should be in good shape.

You can try using a development server to test, but I was afraid of what might happen if two consoles with identical keys started to talk to my clients.