Best Practice Guide on Nimsoft Hub and Nimsoft Robot upgrade

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)
• Unified Infrastructure Management for Mainframe

Issue/Introduction

Need a Best Practice Guide for upgrading the UIM (Nimsoft) hub and robot probes.

When there are new GA releases of the hub and robot probes, we need to know the recommended steps for upgrading these probes when there are multiple hub tiers in the UIM domain.

Environment

Any supported UIM release prior to 9.10
hub:  Any version prior to 9.x
robot_update:  Any version prior to 9.x

Resolution

Deploy the robot (robot_update package), followed by the hub probe on the remote hubs furthest away from the primary.

Reapply any recommended hub/tunnel connection parameter changes again.

For example, the recommended hug and tunnel connection parameters from the following Knowledge Document:

72187 : hub and tunnel connection settings in 7.x and 8.x
https://ca-broadcom.wolkenservicedesk.com/external/article?articleId=72187

Continue upgrading the robot and hub probes on all hubs at each tier working your way back to (and ending with) the probes on the primary hub.

This method is recommended to minimize message delays/loss should you encounter any issues with the probe upgrades.  You can work out the problems on the one hub to assure a smooth upgrade the remaining hubs as you work your way back to the primary hub.

It is also highly recommended that you deploy the same robot version to all of the robots in your UIM domain after the hubs have been upgraded as time permits.

Additional Information

To simplify making hub/tunnel connection changes after upgrading the hub, you can create a hub Configuration only package which contains the key values you wish to change and then deploy this package after deploying the new hub package to your hub servers.

Drag a hub probe to the local archive on your primary hub in Infrastructure Manager.

This will open the Update Packages dialogue for the hub probe with the Configure Only option selected:

Rename the package to prevent overwriting your hub probe package in the archive:

Select OK to save the change, then Edit the new package you created:

Edit the hub.cfx file in the configuration only package:

Delete everything from the hub.cfx file except for the hub/tunnel connection parameters:

Select OK to save the hub.cfx changes, then select OK to save the hub Configuration only package.

Reapplying these specific hub and tunnel connection parameters is required for all hub releases through the 7.93 hub probe release.