The updated ZENworks 2020 installer enables you to first migrate the data from Sybase to PostgreSQL and then upgrade your Management Zone to ZENworks 2020. Following are the additional features introduced in the installer:
Change of Licensing: In the new installer, you have an option to change from ZENworks Suite Licensing to Individual Licensing, or from Individual Licensing to ZENworks Suite Licensing.
ZENworks Diagnostic Center (ZDC) Check: A new step is introduced in the upgrade flow to verify the health of the ZENworks and Audit databases before upgrading the Management Zone.
Services Check: A new step is introduced to check if ZENworks services are stopped on all Primary Servers in the Management Zone. If services are not stopped, then an error window is displayed with the file location that lists all the Primary Servers on which services are still running.
For more information, see the ZENworks Server Installation guide.
In this release ZENworks introduces the Bundle Dashboard feature along with some bundle feature enhancements:
Some of the main benefits of the Bundle Dashboard feature include:
You can now monitor the accurate assignment, distribution, install and launch statuses of a bundle using the new Bundle Status dashlets.
The Bundle dashlets provide the status information faster as the status information is sent directly to Primary Servers instead of through the Collection framework.
These dashlets track the complete status of both parent and child bundles in dependency chains along with the version-specific status for assignment, distribution, install and launch.
Status versioning improves the status accuracy by automatically reconciling statuses when the device is re-imaged or when the cache is cleared.
The dashlet data is optimized and compressed to ensure minimal bandwidth usage.
For more information, see the Accessing the Bundle Dashboard section in the ZENworks Software Distribution Reference.
A setting is now available in ZCC that enables you to cleanup older bundle versions thereby ensuring that space is not occupied by unwanted, older versions of bundles.
The Install Executable action allows administrators to upload an executable and specify the launching options. The executable and related files are then downloaded to the managed device and directly launched on the device. The ability to install and launch an application with a single action, simplifies the process for administrators.
For more information, see the Action - Install Executable section in the ZENworks Software Distribution Reference.
Using the new iOS Update bundle, you can deploy iOS updates to your managed iOS device fleet, using ZENworks.
For more information, see the Distributing iOS/iPadOS Update Bundles section in the ZENworks Mobile Management Reference.
The NetBoot Service feature enables administrators to use the existing ZENworks Primary and Satellite Servers (upgraded to ZENworks 2020) as Apple NetBoot servers and assign NetBoot, NetRestore and NetInstall images to Apple Mac devices by using the MAC address and model details.
For more information, see the ZENworks Preboot Services and Imaging Reference.
ZENworks provides you now with a new, upgraded Remote Management (RM) viewer. The new RM viewer has limited features but it provides better performance while remote controlling devices. Hence, you can now choose to use the old or new viewer based on your requirements. In this release only experimental support is provided for the new RM Viewer.
For more information, see the ZENworks Remote Management Reference.
Administrators can now manage Windows 10 devices using the Windows 10 MDM agent. With the Windows MDM Bulk Enrollment feature, you can bulk enroll Windows 10 devices to ZENworks using a provisioning package, with minimal user involvement. This feature is still under development and only experimental support is provided in this release.
For more information, see the Windows 10 MDM Enrollment Reference.
This feature enables Collection Roll up on Satellite Servers over SSL. You can choose to enable SSL for each Collection Satellite Server that you promote. When the Collection role is promoted with SSL, the Satellite Server allows its managed devices to communicate with the Satellite Servers through HTTPS. The Satellite and Primary Server communication will also happen through HTTPS after the Satellite Server is upgraded to ZENworks 2020. This feature is backward compatible. Hence, even for managed device prior to ZENworks 2020, the collection rollup will be done over SSL using the configured Satellite Servers.The Closest Server Rule for Collection on the managed device is changed to HTTPS URLs, over the SSL port
For more information, see the Collection Role section in the ZENworks Primary Server and Satellite Reference.
IMPORTANT: In this release, Collection Rollup is not supported over SSL, on Mac Satellite Servers using an external Certificate Authority.
Using the ZENworks Explorer Configuration policy, you can set specific bundles as favorites in the ZAPP window. These bundles can be viewed in the favorites folder displayed in the left pane of the ZAPP window and in the ZENworks Explorer window. Using the ZENworks Explorer Configuration policy, you can also set a folder (All, Favorites, or Last) as the default folder when the ZAPP window is opened.
For more information, see the ZENworks Application 2020 guide.
It is now possible to view within ZCC, if ZeUS is active on the device or not. This feature enables you to retrieve accurate information about devices that are not reachable.
NOTE:For more information, see the Viewing and Updating the Managed Device Details section in the ZENworks Discovery, Deployment, and Retirement Reference.
Bundle Activity on a device now displays, more accurate progress, by displaying the action set names that are being executed, even for the child bundles. Thereby ensuring that the end user is provided a more exact status of the bundle activity. This feature allows customers to see the currently running action and bundle icon in the progress window. The Show Bundle Activity window displays the same information that the ZAPP progress window displays, even for the child bundles.
As part of this release, a new recurring queue action is introduced which will take weekly backups of the embedded ZENworks database. By default, the Audit database is not backed up. However, it can be configured, if required. The backup is scheduled for every Sunday, at 12 p.m. However, you can override this schedule and configure a new schedule and change the location of the backup file, if required.
For more information, see the ZENworks 2020 System Backup guide.
ZENworks now lets you leverage the capabilities of the Vertica database to enhance the scalability and performance of the status components. As Vertica provides faster query performance and scalability while analyzing large volumes of data, any delays that you might face while querying for data in the dashlets can be reduced by enabling Vertica in your zone. Also, to view historical trending data within the Patch Tracker and CVE Tracker dashlets you need to have Vertica enabled in the zone. ZENworks provides Vertica as an optional component, which is available only on ZENworks appliances.
For more information, see the Vertica Reference.
ZENworks 2020 onwards, the Sybase database will no longer be supported, and the Sybase data will have to be migrated to any other ZENworks supported database. Using the new Database Migration tool, the Sybase database can be easily migrated to PostgreSQL. The migration tool can be accessed from the Micro Focus Customer Center. For more information, see Database Migration from Sybase to PostgreSQL.
This release also includes the following features:
ZENworks provides a new Configure action that will calibrate and allocate the appropriate memory for all ZENworks processes running on an Appliance or Non-appliance server, based on the available device memory. Using this tool you can also identify the current memory calibration for all services running on the selected server.
For more information, see the Managing Vertica Memory Requirements section in the Vertica Reference and the Managing Memory Requirements on the ZENworks Server section in the ZENworks Upgrade Guide.