How to use consolidation to benefit from new functionality in Foundation

  by Allan Mertner | 24 Mar 2009 | Permalink |

When upgrading to a new version of a piece of software, there is always the risk that something goes wrong: A feature you depend on has changed in an incompatible way, a new bug has made it into the software, or it does something new that has not yet been accepted by the security and compliance people who probably won’t be happy about you running the new version until it has been “proven” to work.

At the same time, that new version has loads of improvements and new features that look very useful and could make a real difference to you in your day-job, so how do you go about benefiting from it? This is particularly relevant with our monthly pre-releases, which have lots of new and improved functionality in them but where we do not provide our usual one-step upgrade script. This means that you don’t want to upgrade your main appliance to the pre-release, and maybe don’t want to or can’t set it up as a second scanning appliance.

If you are already running Foundation 7.2 Enterprise, the answer to this is easy: You install the latest pre-release somewhere and set it up as a target for consolidating the results from your normal scanning appliance. It’s very, very simple to set it up – you just need permission to do so from the scanning appliance and you’re done.

With this setup in place, you can continue scanning your environment as usual, and at the same time use the pre-release with all of your up-to-date scanning data in it to test the latest features to do with reporting, host grouping, visualizations, or whatever happens to be new this time. All of this is possible without having the pre-release version do any actual scanning of the environment, deploying credentials to it, etc, and therefore eliminates the kinds of risks that otherwise could prevent you from easily checking out the latest version.

You can use the same approach to test the the next GA version as well – it’s not limited just to pre-releases. And GA versions of course do have a simple upgrade process that allows you to easily upgrade to the new version once you’re happy to do so.

The most obvious driver for consolidation is to scale up discovery to large estates, but as this shows it is useful in many other scenarios as well. For example, you can use it to scan firewalled-off portions of the network, or to give consultants access to an appliance with all or some of the discovery data, without giving them access to the appliance that does the actual scanning… And of course you can use it to check out the very latest features without any downside at all.

Have you used consolidation in a new and innovative way? Have you tried out the latest pre-release? We can’t wait to discuss it with you!