Patch/Software Management of Linux and Windows virtual machines?

pwjohnstonpwjohnston Member Posts: 441
in Virtualization
Hello, I am looking for some guidance on products that might help a situation we have. We are building a data center and we're still fairly small, but growing. I'm looking for patch management ideas.

We're mostly a Linux environment SLES 11 and RHEL 5, but we do have some Windows VM's. We would like to be able to keep our Dev environment in sync with our Production environment. When an app or patch gets tested and is ready to go that we can mass deploy to our production vm's. We feel like we're eventually going to get to a point where manually keeping everything in sync is not going to be possible because there will just be too many vm's.

How do you guys manage deploying patches and apps to your production servers? vCenter Protect, Puppet, Chef, WSUS?

I'm just starting to research so any links to white papers and case studies would be helpful. Thank You.
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Comments

  • EV42TMANEV42TMAN Member Posts: 256
    I work in a 98% Windows environment and we use WSUS for our patch management.... It works well if you have some one proactively managing it and its great considering that its free. For just Microsoft Product updates it works well there isn't any reason to buy SCCM or something like that. The person whose in charge of managing WSUS for us is always "so busy" and tries to dish off his responsibilities on the rest of us. But that is just my rant about a follow co-worker.. i'll be nice and not get into that. On the linux side I don't have any experience with any linux patch management though.
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  • ptilsenptilsen Member Posts: 2,835 ■■■■■■■■■■
    I have no advice on Linux, but WSUS is the way to go on Windows. It has its quirks, but ultimately the capabilities and functionality are near-perfect. It's also a free feature of Windows Server. For what it really does, that makes it rare.

    I'm working in SCCM right now as 90% of my responsibilities, and we're still going to be using WSUS for update management.
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  • AkaricloudAkaricloud Member Posts: 938
    I also prefer WSUS for Windows servers. It's easy to set up, easy to use and gets the job done.
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  • log32log32 Users Awaiting Email Confirmation Posts: 217
    For Linux you could configure a local repository and get things patched.
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