Walkthrough: Defining a fixed time period for running deploy jobs or patching a server

In a production environment, it is best practice to patch a server or update its software when it is relatively idle, to ensure that its resources are not over-utilized.

TrueSight Server Automation enables you to define a time interval called a maintenance window for servers. All commit operations for deploy jobs on the server will be executed only within this user-defined time interval. If the commit phase of a deploy job is run outside of this time interval, the deploy job fails with an error. The reason for the focus on the commit phase is that all software packages and patches are applied to target servers only during the commit phase of a deploy job.

A maintenance window can be created for an individual server or for server groups or server smart groups.

Before you begin

To define maintenance windows (step 3 below), your role must have authorizations from the MaintenanceWindow family of authorizations. To assign target servers or server groups with maintenance windows, your role must also have the Server.read and ServerGroup.read authorizations. For a full list of authorizations, see System-authorizations. For information about granting authorizations to roles, see Creating-roles.

Step 1: (optional) Grouping servers in server groups or server smart groups

To simplify the task of assigning maintenance windows to a large number of servers, you can prepare server groups or server smart groups based on criteria that are relevant to your business needs.

Refer to the following pages for information about creating server groups or server smart groups:

Step 2: Enabling the Maintenance Window feature on the server, server group, or server smart group



Step 3: Defining the maintenance window and assigning it to servers




Deactivating and activating a maintenance window

You can temporarily deactivate and subsequently re-activate any defined maintenance window.

Grouping all servers associated with a specific maintenance window

You can use a server property to create a smart group that groups together all servers associated with a specific maintenance window. Such a smart group will later be useful when you need to select servers, especially when selecting targets for a job.

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