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

BladeLogic

[Webdude]

I interviewed a while ago with a company called BladeLogic, they provide a suit of products for these type of tasks and all types of DataCenter management. I would defiantly give them a look they could help out on this project and many many in the future. http://www.bladelogic.com/
B

Re:Run away, into a hole somewhere

[ErikTheRed]

Why? Because someone told GWB that it was a good idea, and that it would help in the war on terror.

Bzzzzt. Wrong. Somebody told him it would reduce national energy consumption. But than you for playing.

That being said, IMHO the whole DST thing is stupid and obnoxious.

the cure for your DST woes

[FreeBSD evangelist]

Move to Arizona, where we don't have Daylight Savings Time.