IBM Security Guardium

 View Only
  • 1.  Migration of HW appliance to Virtual appliance

    Posted Sun June 26, 2022 04:06 AM
    Dear All,

    I have requirement for migration of HW appliance to Virtual appliance 

    if anyone has already done or on how to perform please provide the steps/procedure to achieve this.

    Summary on their environment:
    • Current setup
    o 1 physical central manager.
    o 1 virtual aggregator.
    o 4 physical collector.
    o 7 virtual collector.

    The requirement is we want to migrate only the physical appliances to virtual (total 5).

    ------------------------------
    Maqsood Raza
    ------------------------------


  • 2.  RE: Migration of HW appliance to Virtual appliance

    Posted Mon June 27, 2022 08:58 AM
    Maqsood,
    The best method is a backup and restore method.
    Please see the link below.
    Identifying the correct upgrade path

    Build your new appliance VMs and then backup and restore them. 

    Always start with your central manager.
    I always forget to mention to make sure your STAPs have a failover before you unregister them and migrate them.
    Export some items like users, groups, queries, reports, policies, etc. as an extra measure.
    Unregister the non-CM so everything is cleanly disconnected.
    To make life easier, make sure you are using the same version or you might get some version incompatibility issues.

    Good luck!! Have a great day.
    Jennifer Dodson

    ------------------------------
    Jennifer Dodson
    Senior Security Technical Specialist
    US National Market Southwest
    1 469 990 5954 Mobile
    jennifer.dodson@ibm.com

    IBM
    ------------------------------



  • 3.  RE: Migration of HW appliance to Virtual appliance

    Posted Tue June 28, 2022 02:53 AM
    Dear Jennifer,

    Thank you for your time to look into this and prompt reply.

    We are replacing the Physical to virtual appliance with same IP, so there will be no need to re-install the agents right.

    and also, we need to remove and add all the collectors again from CM? and how much will be downtime for this entire activity.

    Thanks,
    Maqsood
    +971569061219


    ------------------------------
    Maqsood Raza
    ------------------------------



  • 4.  RE: Migration of HW appliance to Virtual appliance

    Posted Fri July 01, 2022 10:01 AM
    Maqsood,
    I apologize for my delay in responding.  
    So if I am understanding correctly, you are moving the 1 Central Manager and 4 collectors to VMs.
    It might be easier to start with the collectors first.  Do one at a time.
    For the collectors, 
    1) make sure each STAP has a failover collector
    2) make sure your data from the collectors has been exported and imported to the aggregator
    3) un-register the collector from the central manager
    4) shutdown the physical collector and build the new collector as VM (same IP, hostname, etc.)
    5) register the new VM collector with the CM. Make sure any schedules, policies, datamart, configuration templates are pushed to the new collector.   The STAPs should move back over to the collector.
    6) Repeat this for the 4 collectors.

    The Central Manager is going to be much trickier though.  If your data is being imported to the Aggregator then the CM shouldn't have too much data. 
    I would recommend you backup everything - config and data. And I would make sure you export users, groups, policies, alerts, etc. - Everything just in case. 
    The backup and recovery method is best. The collectors will still get STAP data while the CM is being rebuilt but GIMs will be down. The shorter the period of time for the transition, the better. You might have to get GIM's restarted where they might not restart after the change.  Downtime depends on the size of the appliance.  The more data, the longer it will take.

    Good luck!!

    ------------------------------
    Jennifer Dodson
    Senior Security Technical Specialist
    US National Market Southwest
    1 469 990 5954 Mobile
    jennifer.dodson@ibm.com

    IBM
    ------------------------------