Update and Deploy Additional Inventory Beacons

The inventory beacon is enhanced in 2024 R2, and should be updated to take advantage of the most recent functionality.

Key points to note include the following:
Upgrading from Notes

Any version, where you used a custom account to run the FlexNet Beacon Engine service.

The FlexNet Beacon Engine service normally runs as the local SYSTEM account on the inventory beacon (the default and recommended configuration). If you provided alternative credentials (perhaps to manage access through a proxy server), be aware that these credentials are not known to FlexNet Manager Suite, so that whenever an inventory beacon is automatically updated with a new version of the FlexNet Beacon software, the credentials for running the service are reset to SYSTEM. Hence, if you have manually configured custom credentials on an inventory beacon, you must re-configure those same credentials after each upgrade to FlexNet Beacon.

Any version before 2016 R1
To take advantage of access evidence used for CAL calculations, you must upgrade inventory beacons from version 2016 R1.
Tip: For the same reason, instances of FlexNet Inventory Agent locally installed on devices and reporting through these inventory beacons must also be upgraded. For details, see Configure Updates to Inventory Agents.

Release 2015 or earlier

If you are using ILMT for DB2 as an inventory source, the DB2 drivers on the inventory beacon must be upgraded to 64-bit.

Release 2014 R2 or earlier

If an inventory beacon functions as a parent to any other beacon, and is using Microsoft IIS as its web server, it must be updated as described in the following topics to grant access to the folder used for staging uploads, and to the files that must be served to a child beacon.
Because of the self-updating functionality introduced for inventory beacons at version 2014 R2, the processes are quite different, and are covered in separate topics below, for: