Getting started with patch management

The following topics introduce you to the concept of patch management in BMC BladeLogic Server Automation (BSA).

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BMC Education Services provide Foundation courses covering the topics discussed in the walkthroughs available in this section. The education classes discuss when and why to make use of various features as well as the “how-to”. If you are interested in looking deeper into these topics, we recommend that you check out the Server Automation education offerings at BMC Server Automation Training.

This section includes the following topics:

Topic

What is it about?

This topic introduces you to the concept of patch management in BSA, which is the process of building and maintaining a patch repository, analyzing target servers, and, if necessary, packaging and deploying patches. 

This topic walks you through the process of setting up a patching administrator and limiting permissions so that administrator cannot perform other types of actions in BSA. Although this process is not essential for patch management, BMC always recommends that you grant users the minimum set of permissions needed to perform actions.

This topic walks you through the process of creating a patch catalog for Microsoft Windows patches. A patch catalog provides a place to store metadata about patches and the patch payloads themselves. Patch catalogs can be designed for specific needs.

This topic walks you through the process of setting up a patch catalog for a Red Hat Linux. It also explains how to set up a smart group that automatically selects a subset of the patches in the patch catalog.

This topic walks you through the process of using BSA to analyze the Microsoft Windows systems in your environment to see if there are systems that require patches and updates. 

This topic walks you through the process of using BSA to analyze the Linux systems in your environment to see if there are systems that require patches and updates. This example demonstrates analysis on Red Hat Linux servers.

This topic walks you through the process of automating the deployment of patches and updates for Microsoft Windows operating systems, using BSA. 

This topic walks you through a process that can identify servers with access and writeability issues before those problems are exposed during critical patching, scripting, or deployment operations.

 

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