Patch/Software Management of Linux and Windows virtual machines?

pwjohnston

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.

EV42TMAN

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.