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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?"
If you have 7000+ Windows Servers you should already be running a software patching solution such as SMS, WSUS, etc...
Sure you'll spend a large amount of time sorting out which server[s] (server group[s])should be patched when, but once that is done - you should be able to schedule them within your chosen solution.
Take WSUS for example. Organise your servers into groups, approve the update and set each group's Windows Update GP properties appropriately.
Crazy, huh? It gets better! For some systems, it's a MAJOR patch. Take AIX for example. It's going to take us 1.3GB worth of updates to fulfill the dependencies of the package that actually needs updating.
Oh, and Java needs to be patched separately too. They store their timezones internally, instead of consulting the operating system.