Scheduling Large Scale Server Upgrades/Outages?

thesandbender asks: "I've inherited my companies DST patching project and I have to schedule upgrades for 7000+ servers over the course of the next few weeks. Of course each group inside the company has different SLA's and outage windows. I need to somehow turn the pile of spreadsheets I have into a database and create a schedule that spreads the load over our pool of system administrators. There is no way I can reasonably accomplish this by hand, and even software for other industries/applications that could take a few steps out of the process would be appreciated. Does anyone know of a rule based scheduling system where I provide the available outage windows and a priority ranking for each system and the scheduler will recommend the order in which they should be upgraded?"

Comments

some almost advice

[ILuvRamen]

1. Stop using acronyms that nobody knows, slashdotters hate that!
2. never ever ever use spreadsheets ever to hold data ever because you'll eventually want to do database operations on it
3. and as for the specialized software suites that do all that logic and notification and stuff, it'd take longer setup and configure that than to do it manually and cost an ungodly amount of money for licensing. Plus it never gets the logic right because tons of human reasoning is involved in which to drop when and stuff and computers can't handle that. If I were you, I'd stick some blank transparencies in the printer and print color coded, graphical timeline sort of outage window schedules from each department or whatever and then just lay them on top of each other in logical ways until you come up with something that works. The main object is to go through the first day and pack as many possible downtimes together in a row as you can then go to the next day and do the same thing until they all have a scheduled time for when they are allowed to be down. Make sure every single upgrade time has at least one secondary possible time in case the one before it takes longer than it should (which will happen a lot) If you have them arrangeable in overlapping transparencies that way and they can be easily rearranged and examined visually, it's better than any computer program except you're doing all the logic, but that really shouldn't take much longer than an hour or two if you use the logical pattern I said. Hope that made sense cuz it did in my head lol.