Overview of the patching process for AIX
TrueSight Server Automation patch management for AIX includes the following phases:
- Create a catalog of patches.
- Run a Patching Job to identify missing patches on your servers.
- Run a Remediation Job, which creates software packages containing the patch payloads. The Remediation Job also creates a Deploy Job for the servers that you want to remediate.
- Run the Deploy Job to apply the patches to the servers.
In each phase of the patch management process, you control the scope of the jobs. You also monitor and verify each stage before moving to the next stage. You have complete control over when each job runs. Patch downloads can occur directly from vendor websites over the Internet (online mode) or in a separate operation previous to the patching process (offline mode).
The following figure illustrates the sequence of jobs in the TrueSight Server Automation patch management process. Some tasks can be accomplished at several points in the process depending on the options you select. This figure shows the process as it occurs using the recommendations in this paper.