Dana,
We are just finishing this process for our field servers that have not been getting updated from their initial deployment. So we had 4.9, 5.3, 6.3, 6.4, 7.0 and quite a few other versions. Here's the process we did that worked and pieces that broke.
1. Deploy the certificate using configure or repair agents by setting the trust relationship to trust by certificate. Also select the Configure SNMP.
2. Run Identify task.
3. Build a custom support pack in VCRM that just has the vca and smh version that you wish to standardize your company on. ie I chose the versions in he 7.6 psp because of all the chatter with issues being reported on this board. Note: make sure you've configured both the vca and SMH before you build your custom pack.
4. Deploy out your custom support pack as an initial deployment to your servers. Here is where timing was tricky for me. I have very strict maintenance windows for reboots. So I did this deployment without selecting the option for reboot the week leading up to my Windows OS patch window. So I let the OS patches reboot the system.
5. After the reboot, I ran identify, software polling and data collection choosing to overwrite the data.
6. Next I built collections that for trusted servers with agents with any version. This then gives you a collection that shows the version of the agents installed that you can sort by and work from. Any servers that have older than 7.0 on them we found it was better to do a manual install of the older pieces and then do an initial deployment of the 7.6 agents. For the 7.6 agents we built a custom support pack without the Nic or the Network control applet included. There are problems deploying the these in the old machines where the nic will go nuts in windows. I couldn't narrow it down to a specfic model or nic model so we went with deploying without it. Then we will go back and deploy these two items by model and nic installed.
I found we had no problem updating from 7.0 to 7.6 without first removing the installed version.
After the trust is established then you can also use your collections to update the snmp to what you want your standard to be before you do the uninstalls. If you are going to run Remote support you will need both a read only string and a read-write string. We configure one of the agents 7.0 to 7.30 for each 2k and 2k3. Then use this to repicate the snmp community strings and the trap destinations out. Make sure you use one 2k example to do the 2k machines and a 2k3 example to do the 2k3 machines. If you try to use 2k to do 2k3 it caused problems for us.
Also on the snmp if you currently have your servers set to accept from any hosts then don't replicate this option out. One of the guys here changed this to accept only from certain hosts by mistake and then we tried to replicate back out to set it back to accept from any hosts and it just wrote garbage to the target. A support case was opened and they could not provide a solution to fix this.
I know this isn't an easy list of getting everything cleaned up and reporting. Trust I know I have 1300 servers in the field that we are having to do this on. Then I have another 900 here at the data center that had to be updated from 7.0 and moved to a new SIM box.
We did do the removals manually as I didn't have and couldn't find silent uninstall directions that I could put in a vb script.
Hope this helps.
