I'm looking for info to automate the patching/updating process for several hundred Suse machines. Apart from Zenworks and SMT is there other patch management/automation tools you know with good support on Novell SLES OS?
I found several tools but mainly for Windows...
Do you have any experience with the following tools and Novell SLES servers?
- Patchlink from lumension
- Tivoli Provision Manager from IBM
- Bigfix
- HP Server Automation
- BMC Bladelogic
- CA Spectrum Automation Manager
The datacenter to keep updated is composed around 600 servers both real and virtual running SLES version 10 mainly (but SLES 9 also present).
I think SMT could do most part of the job but it seems to come short regarding reporting and inventory. Do you know of complementary tools for these aspects ?
Thanks for any advice.
As you have HP server and you mention HP datacenter.
The tool who do that for HP is Server Automation, it's support Suse 9 and 10 for :
It's also able to integrate with iLo to automate OS provisioning.
From an official Novell perspective, the available tools are SMT (Subscription Management Tool) and ZLM (Zenworks Linux Management).
SMT is a free tool that simply accesses your entitled Suse subscriptions on Novell's servers, and lets you cache the patches and updates locally. This lets you update a large number of servers without sending your bandwidth usage through the roof. This is strictly a pull arrangement, though. Your systems can connect to the SMT server for their packages, but this is not a system for automatically distributing the packages.
ZLM is a web-based tool for administering your Suse (and Red Hat) systems in your datacenter. It is licensed on a per physical machine basis. It enables you to push packages to the systems using policies and schedules (as well as manually).
Beyond those official Novell tools, it starts to get a little bit murky. You can cobble something together with various open-source tools, such as Puppet.