Product guide

Upgrading and Restoring Agents
Use these tasks to upgrade or restore existing agents in your environment.
If you have been using an older version of ePolicy Orchestrator and have previous agent versions
in your environment, you can upgrade those agents once you’ve installed your new ePO server.
The procedure for upgrading the agent depends on which agent version is running on your
managed systems.
NOTE: Some previous agent versions do not support all functions in ePolicy Orchestrator 4.5.
For full ePolicy Orchestrator functionality, upgrade to agent version 4.5 or later.
Tasks
Upgrading agents using product deployment task
Upgrading agents manually or with login scripts
Restoring a previous version of the agent (Windows)
Restoring a previous version of the agent (UNIX)
Upgrading agents using product deployment task
Use this task to deploy a newer version of the agent with the Product Deployment client task.
This is the same task that is used to deploy products, such as VirusScan Enterprise, to systems
that are already running agents.
Periodically, McAfee releases newer versions of the agent, which can be deployed and managed
using ePolicy Orchestrator. When the agent installation package is available, you can download
it from the McAfee download site, check it in to the master repository, then use the deployment
task to upgrade the agent.
NOTE: The term upgrading is not the same as updating . Upgrading the agent means installing
a newer version of the agent over an older version, for example, replacing McAfee Agent 4.0
with McAfee Agent 4.5. Updating means getting the most up-to-date DATs and signatures that
products use to identify and disarm threats.
Before you begin
• If you use ePolicy Orchestrator to deploy agents in your network, the procedure differs
slightly depending which previous version of the agent you are upgrading.
• If you are upgrading your agents and your network is very large, consider the size of the
agent installation package file and your available bandwidth before deciding how many
agents to upgrade at once. Consider using a phased approach. For example, upgrade one
group in your System Tree at a time. In addition to balancing network traffic, this approach
makes tracking progress and troubleshooting any issues easier.
• If you use a product deployment client task to upgrade agents, consider scheduling the task
to run at different times for different groups in the System Tree.
29McAfee Agent software version 4.5 Product Guide