I have inherited a minimally documented SEPM environment and have been tasked with upgrading it. It is a SEPM 12.1.4 environment consisting of 5 SEPM servers with about 5,000 clients. For now, this upgrade is to SEPM 12.1.6. Also, there is new server hardware for this upgrade. All of the 5 current SEPMs are each in their own site, I think. 3 of the SEPMs, I believe can be removed from the environment, as 1 only has 1 client (itself) and the 2 other SEPMs aren’t accessible as the SEPM service fails to stay started with 1 SEPM also having had its SQL DB instance server deleted and no backups. The other 2 SEPMs appear to be the primary & secondary (or failover) with site replication. The primary shows about 5,000 clients Online and the secondary shows about 5,000 clients Online on remote site.
What would be the best way to clean up this SEPM environment? Should I first cancel replication, delete replication partners, and delete remote sites (for the deleted rep partners) on the primary & secondary SEPM’s. Then cancel replication, delete replication partners and delete all remote sites on the SEPM with just 1 client (itself), and finally un-install SEPM from all 3 SEPMs to be removed.
Next I would install SEPM 12.1.4 on 2 new servers. For this, I would have 2 SQL server DB instances setup on the SQL servers cluster, 1 for the new primary SEPM and the other for the new secondary SEPM. Install SEPM 12.1.4 with a custom configuration, of Install an additional site, so each of the new SEPMs are in their own sites. Once the installs are complete, replication between the 4 SEPM servers will be configured and executed. Up to this point the clients should not have been impacted. Does this seem correct?
Once the replication has executed for several cycles, and EVERYTHING appears to be working fine (daily reports are running, client definition files are current,…), the Management server lists priorities would be changed so that the 2 new SEPM servers have a 1 and 2 setting, with the old SEPMs getting moved down or even deleted from the server list. Once all of the clients are Online or Online on remote site for the new primary and secondary SEPM servers we can remove the old SEPM servers from the environment (On the old servers; cancel replication, delete replication partners, delete remote sites, and then finally un-install SEPM).
At this point, the 2 new 12.1.4 SEPM servers (Primary and Secondary) are setup in failover configuration, with 2 new DB servers configured all on new hardware. The next step is to upgrade to 12.1.6…
Is my process correct? Did I leave anything out?