Moving from Tivoli Configuration Manager to Tivoli Endpoint Manager

There is a lot of excitement around IBM’s new acquisition, BigFix now rebranded as IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager (TEM). The name TEM has led to some confusion for people that are using IBM Tivoli Framework, I certainly got a few confused responses when I announced some new features being developed in Tivoli Endpoint Manager.

The TEM product is positioned to replace several legacy IBM products including Tivoli Configuration Manager (TCM), so I thought I would take a look at the products side by side to see what all the excitement is about.

I am going to start off with the installation of TEM and TCM, my environment is all built on four  Windows 2003 virtual machines, I have chosen quite a simple environment to start off with, but will add in more complexity as I go.  The TMR server and TEM Enterprise server are running on separate virtual machines, but I am co-hosting the other software components so that I can take a look at the migration paths later.

The diagram below summarises the environment:

TCM to TEM Migration

TCM to TEM Migration Environment

You might ask why I have chosen Windows 2003 and MSSQL, well there are a few reasons it was sort of forced on me, firstly TEM currently only supports MSSQL databases, and the TEM Enterprise server is currently only supported on Windows. This is not a problem for TCM as it supports multiple architectures.

Right lets get started, I have downloaded the media but which product shall I start with, well if the size of the media is related to how long it is going to take me to install the products, then I am going to start with the quick one, TEM is less than 400 Mega bytes and TCM is measured in Giga bytes.

Come back to find out how the installation goes…

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