Patch maintenance for your company

Hey everybody,

I'm trying to get some ideas for how other companies are handling patching to see if there is a better way to handle this requirement. We normally patch on the second Saturday after patch Tuesday. All non-essential servers and vm templates are patched after hours in the week prior to patch Saturday. That leaves around 500 servers to be patched between 13 people. We use Shavlik to push patches and monitor the progress. Patching starts at 8am and ends at midnight. We usually finish the initial patching around 3pm and start testing all the systems to make sure they are all back online. Due to business requirements we are only allowed one Saturday for this outage so it is not something we can spread out. Letting people work from home is not ideal since there have been occasions when people disappear for hours on end or have to call in and have someone else troubleshoot a server that won't come back up.

How does your company handle the patching process?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

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Comments

blargoe

Our process is very similar to yours, except we're stuck with WSUS, and all of our guys aren't diligent with testing. One Saturday a month for patching and whatever other maintenance we have to do.

azjag

blargoe wrote: »

Our process is very similar to yours, except we're stuck with WSUS, and all of our guys aren't diligent with testing. One Saturday a month for patching and whatever other maintenance we have to do.

The only reason we have one Saturday a month is because the network team has a Maintenance window on a different weekend. We are not allowed to overlap weekends or be down more than 2 Saturdays a month. We came across too many problems having network upgrades and system patching on the same weekend. The only reason I ask this is I put my name in for a supervisor position and this is one of the things I will be responsible for if I get the job. That and incorporate any other good ideas I come across.