Advantage of upgrading agents

[iazms]

Is there any point in upgrading the Compaq Management Agents from version 4.9 to 5.4 and is version 5.4 the latest version out?

Will the servers require a reboot after the agents have been upgraded.

M.S.

 

[ntinlin]

Later agents tend to have bug fixes, recognise new equipment etc.
6.40 is the latest version of SmartStart, although you can't use it to build an older server with.


Personally I'd try it one one system and see if you like any of the features and go from there. There is no real technical reason to upgrade. One main benefit of current SS versions is that you can remotely install all the drivers, agents etc., except NIC agents, over the network from your workstation. Quite handy really.

Reboot. Hmm.
Probably if you are doing more than the agents. Think the current agents require a later version of the mgt. drivers which will require a reboot.

Neill

 

[meireles]

Hi,

You should upgrade your agents for security reasons: several vulnerabilities have been discovered on agents version 4.x and 5.x. The current Proliant Support Pack can be downloaded from the HP site and is about 50MB.

Paulo Meireles

 

[willir]

iazms

meireles is right regarding security and vulnerabilities. If nothing else, hopefully you have changed your SNMP community strings.

I do have one complaint about upgrades, and it is a hit and miss. Sometimes the new agent, perhaps to address a bug or compatability problem has less functionaility than an older agent.

For example, from my Proliant 6000 servers, I used to be able to see the I/O performance of the bus. After the upgrade, I could only see CPU utilization. As we all know the CPU performance can be quite modest while the I/O is red lining. Hard to tell this with CIM 2000 miles away without the I/O performance indicator.

Alas, the agent upgrade only listed the bug fixes, and new hardware and did not inform me of what I would loose.

Richard

 

[iazms]

Thanks guys.
Ok version 6.40 is the latest i agree. So what are the pre-requisites to upgrading the agents to version 6.40 eg some of my servers are Win NT 4.0 SP3. Will they need to be SP4.

Neil, you said something about them not being used to build an older server with.

Also what do you mean by "later version of the mgt. drivers" How can i check what version i currently have installed?!?

M.S

 

[NortonES2]

NT4 would upgrade this to SP6a, also for NT I believe the latest version of the agents is 6.30.

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If it doesn't leak oil it must be empty!!

 

[iazms]

Sorry i was mistaking service pack for Win2K with NT4.0

All the NT boxes are SP6a.

Is there any other pre-requisite for upgrading the agents to the latest available? both for Win 2K and NT4.0

Thanks
M.S

 

[willir]

The only prerequest I am really aware of is that SNMP must be installed. (For NT,4.0 this means reapplying sp6a)

Also, make sure you have a backup.

 

[ntinlin]

When you run the setup for say smartstart 6.40 within windows it will scan the machine and tell you what versions of software are there already.

Neill