Change Auditor Upgrade and SQL Migration (4257246)

Please note: Change Auditor Coordinator, Client, and Agents require at least .NET 4.7.2 or later to be installed on the host. For more information, refer to the installation guide:

https://support.quest.com/technical-documents/change-auditor/installation-guide/

Please note that the order of upgrade operations should be:

1) Upgrade all the coordinators

2) Upgrade all the clients (this needs to be done before it can be used)

3) Upgrade all the web clients (this needs to be done before it can be used)

4) Upgrade all the agents (can be done at your leisure)

If your licenses need to be upgraded to work with the new install, you can simply reach out to the licensing department (https://support.quest.com/contact-us/licensing) or to your sales rep and they will get you squared away as soon as possible.

It is important during the upgrade that you enter all the information into the dialogue boxes correctly. You must get the installation name correct and the accounts that you're using to do the installation and to connect to the SQL DB must have the appropriate permissions and rights.

If you're looking to move to new hardware entirely (no in-place upgrade) I would do the following:

1) Setup your new server(s) with Server 2012 R2/Server 2016/ Server 2019 and make sure they're stable

2) Once you're happy with the build, install the new coordinator with the latest version of Change Auditor. The new version upgrade will take all your down-level coordinators offline and agents will automatically start to migrate to the new coordinator.

3) You can install any additional coordinators at this point and start to roll out the agent updates at your leisure.

4) Update the client software on any hosts that it is installed on

5) Update the Web Client on all hosts that it is installed on

6) Uninstall the down-level coordinator software off of the old hosts, this will clear up the latent SCPs in Active Directory.

7) Once everything else is complete and you're satisfied with the upgrade, you can move the database to a new server if you wish to upgrade that as well. - Please note that it is very important that you make the collation on the new SQL server match the collation of the old one for the move - You can either do a full backup/restore to move the database or copy over the MDF & LDF files For the SQL migration,

Migrating the database:

Make sure the collation on the new SQL server matches the collation on the old SQL server

Shut down all coordinators in your environment

Do a full SQL backup of your "old" change auditor database - Shut down the "old" SQL server and keep it offline in case you need to revert to using it

Do a SQL restore of your "old" database to your "new" SQL server

Optionally, you could copy the change auditor database to the new server (.mdf and .ldf) and import the files instead of using the backup/restore

Ensure that the accounts and permissions are still correct on the "new" database

Disable the firewall rule that enables agents to connect to a single coordinator

Edit the coordinator configuration (on that single coordinator) and put in the new SQL server

Enable the coordinator and connect with the client to verify that your data is still available

Once data integrity is verified, re-enable the firewall rule that allows agent communication

You can then edit the configuration on any additional coordinators in the environment to put in the new SQL server and then enable them.