ESMC 7.2 Upgrade Questions

[EricW 0]

I've recently taken over as the administrator for ESET in our organization, and have a few questions about upgrading to ESMC 7.2.  I understand the basics of how to do so, but have the below questions:

• We use SCCM to deploy the all-in-one package since ESET doesn't provide options to gracefully reboot after the EndPoint install. (This is an Enterprise product, right?  Corporate users aren't fond of their computers randomly rebooting without warning, and not rebooting is not an option since functionality is limited and our users tend to not reboot for weeks)  Unfortunately I cannot create a All-in-one package with the latest agent version unless I'm already on ESMC 7.2?  We're currently on 7.1.717.0.
• If I do update to ESMC 7.2, will it cause problems if our agents are still all on 7.1.717.0?  Do we have to upgrade every agent before upgrading ESMC?  

Thanks in advance!

[Marcos 5,074]

You can upgrade the ESMC server to v7.2 first, 7.1 agents will be able to connect to it.

In order to upgrade the server, just send an ESMC component upgrade task to the machine. However, we strongly recommend backing up the database and the server, agent peer certificates as well as the CA certificate.

Agents 7.1 and older will stop to work next year after installing Windows 10 21H1 Update. Until then they should work alright.

[EricW 0]

Thanks Marcos.  A couple more questions:

I've made the backups as suggested, and I also have nightly snaps of the ESMC server VM.  Do you know if there are any complications if I just restore the VM from a backup, or should it just pick up where it left off? 

If I upgrade the ESMC during business hours, will the endpoint clients provide any notification to users that there server is down/offline?  

Lastly, do you know if there are any plans to include a graceful reboot process for the Endpoint install in v8?  Like a counter down timer or suspend option?

[Marcos 5,074]

It's easier with VM's where you can create a snapshot as a backup. There should be no complications with that.

An ESMC server upgrade should not take too long; during this time agents will not be able to replicate the data but they will replicate it once the server upgrade has completed. Endpoint on clients will not report any messages to users while the server upgrades.

V8 supports so-called micro PCU which are differential (relatively small) updates. These are downloaded but run after the next machine restart so users will not receive a notification to reboot the machine.