What is Configuration Management?

This topic introduces you to the concept of configuration management in TrueSight Server Automation. It includes the following sections:

Introduction

As you know all too well, configuration management tasks often make up the bulk of the activities performed in a data center, including patching, configuring, updating, and reporting on servers.

Existing approaches to configuration and change control management range from highly expensive and purely reactive efforts when problems arise, to manual process-intensive configuration and change control procedures. Typically, when administrators must implement change, they run custom scripts or modify one server at a time using point tools like Windows Terminal Services, telnet, or SSH. Painful! This process is time-consuming, to say the least, and limits responsiveness at most data centers. In addition, the manual nature of these changes inevitably leads to errors causing drift in server configurations. With TrueSight Server Automation, IT organizations can provision, patch, configure, and update servers across platforms and data centers, which enables consistency in change and configuration management with minimal scripting and manual intervention.

TrueSight Server Automation enables consistency in change and configuration management activities. With TrueSight Server Automation you can deploy various configuration objects to target servers and run batch jobs that configure server settings.

How does BSA manage ad-hoc and structured server configuration?

So, you' have a working TrueSight Server Automation instance. Agents are deployed on all of the servers you want to manage. Now it's time to deploy some software. Software packaging and deployment is a common administrative task, and a good good opportunity for time savings using automation, especially on more complex packages. 

Packaging can also rapidly increase the rate at which new servers are built. Most organizations have automated the building of a basic server, but the follow-on deployment of the different monitoring, backup, and security agents, server hardening, patching, and compliance validation steps can still take an awful long time. In some organizations, it can take weeks to roll out or upgrade a particularly difficult software package. The obvious place to start is with basic software deployments.

TrueSight Server Automation supports a policy-based approach whereby changes are applied to a policy, from which subscribing servers pull down the updates. This capability significantly lowers the cost and errors associated with managing server infrastructure. TrueSight Server Automation customers have dramatically lowered their operating costs by using Configuration Manager to automate:

  • Provisioning of base OS, server stack components (middleware,utilities, system software), or multi-tier applications and manage deployments
  • Change control for patches, packages, and configuration updates. 

From the console, you create BLPackages to deploy content, configuration changes, and applications on remote servers.

Overview of BLPackages

Failed to execute the [excerpt-include] macro. Cause: [Error number 2 in 0: No wiki with id [confluencePage:page] could be found]. Click on this message for details.

Where to go from here

Walkthrough-Changing-the-root-password-for-a-set-of-systems

 

Tip: For faster searching, add an asterisk to the end of your partial query. Example: cert*