5.x to 6.1 upgrade

It sounds like you are installing a new infrastructure (a fresh install) and attempting to have the existing agents communicate with that freshly installed infrastructure as opposed to upgrading your existing 5.2 SP5 infrastructure to 6.1 I don't believe SP5 agents against a freshly install 6.1 infrastructure is supported and I don't think it even worked with previous versions, though I could be wrong.

However, you should be able to go through an upgrade (not freshly install a new 6.1 infrastructure) and the 5.2 SP5 agents will continue to work with the upgraded 6.1 infrastructure.

Actually, you are wrong
The SP5 agents are supposed to work with this new version of ControlCenter. They did with 6.0.

So it appears I actually have two choices:
1.) Upgrade old_ecc_server from SP5 to 6.0, then migrate the entire 6.0 to the new server hardware, then migrate to 6.1
2.) Uninstall SP5 master agents on 40 hosts; then reinstall them.

Neither one sounds fun to me .....

-jq

The SP5 agents should ]work with 6.1 just like they work with 6.0. The only restriction is that the infrastructure that those agents were associated with has to have been upgraded and not freshly installed.

I believe you can do option 1 but just upgrade old_ecc_server from SP5 to 6.1 in one step and then migrate to the new server hardware following the approved steps for migration which probably involves maintaining the same FQDN, doing database exports and imports, etc.

One option to consider is to take this opportunity to move to running the infrastructure on a VM. That way you can do things like VMotion the VM to different hardware pretty seamlessly. I have not tried it, but you should be able to migrate the existing server to a VM automatically using a VMware supplied utility.

You'll actually find that what Julianne has described is correct, issues have been seen with agents from 5.2 being upgraded to 6.1 after the infrastructure has been upgraded to 6.1

I know what your saying, I saw this in our lab environment about 2 weeks ago and pointed it out to some team members who were as shocked as I was. It turns out it was just coming to light at the time.

Thanks for validating this issue, Michael.

Wendy indicated that several customers have experienced this issue and engineering was working it. Unfortunately, the security changes in 6.1 appear to eliminate the ability to point to a new ECC server using ctg.ini and mga.ini files.

One great thing about the 6.1 version is the much improved Clariion monitoring .....

Regards & Happy Labor Day Weekend ....

Julianne

It sounds like this is only a problem if a user is installing ECC 6.1 on a new server.

If we upgrade from ECC 5.2 SP5 to ECC 6.1 we should not encounter any issues because the Master Agents will not need to be pointed at a different server.

Is this correct?

Have a great weekend!

Hi nystrole-
You are correct, you *shouldn't* encounter any issues ....
-jq

I ended up uninstalling 6.1 and going with 6.0.
The upgrading agents seems to be working fine so far....

How do you manually uninstall Master agent?

Isaac

I recently upgraded from 5.2 SP5 to 6.1. Upgrading agents from ECC console hang and didn't work. Following is what I did to get around the problem:

1. Uninstall ECC 5.2 host master agent using uninstall_master.bat that comes with ECC 5.2

2. Install ECC 6.1 host master agent

3. From console right click on host and select install agent and choose all the agent that need to be installed

4. Step 3 effectively upgrades all of the agents that are installed on a host with the old ECC release

It is an hassle to go through and uninstall all of the 5.2 host master agents and reinstalling it but it works.

Isik

"The problems encountered with 6.1 are specific to the new security settings.
We unfortunately need to uninstall the previous version agents and install the 6.1 Master agent on each of the targeted hosts."

Has this problem been resolved with any of the patches?

Hi nystrole,

There is no longer any need to uninstall the previous agent versions before installing the 6.1 Master Agent. However, you still do need to make some manual changes before upgrading the old 5.2.x/6.0 agents. Please see EMC ControlCenter 6.1 Planning and Installation Guide Volume 1 (REV A06), Appendix F, Upgrading Agents after a New Installation (pages 451-456) for specific details.


Regards,
Séamus Coffey
EMC Global Services

There was a comment regarding running ECC on VMguest... can you? I thought it had to be standalone server