First, I hope this is an appropriate area for this question.
There has been some talk at my company about possibly using BigFix to patch Middleware products (like WebSphere, IIS, MS SQL Server). I don’t know if BigFix will be advantageous in the management of this type of patching.
Maybe someone can comment from real world experience. Please understand, I don’t need marketing pitches from the company.
Can anyone point me to any documentation and/or other discussions talking directly about Middleware, versus OS patching?
Sine you’re not getting an answer, I’ll step in and try to keep the marketing down
Patching can be looked at as a two part problem – platform and content. Platform can be as simple as a command protocol and an agent running as root or system, or it can be wildly complex. TEM/BigFix is a very powerful and lightweight platform for patching, and there’s no reason it can’t work for patching middleware apps just as well as it does for other apps and the OSes under them.
Content is the other part of the problem… what will we do to detect the problem, correct the problem, and make sure the correction worked? At its simplest (from our perspective), this is a matter of writing scripts to do those three things; at its most complex, this is pre-built material that flows from our systems to yours. We do content for many platforms and applications, but we don’t do it for all of them. IIS and SQL are covered for instance, while WebSphere is not at this time.
BigFix can do anything that you can script a computer to do – I’m not familiar with the methods used by those FixPacks so I hesitate to say that it will absolutely work, but it’s certainly worth investigating.
kdsimms, Anything that you repeat over and over in your Websphere environment can be scripted. Those scripts can be initiated by Bigfix if desired. We have run Websphere for years (since 3.5). There are some scripts for Websphere that we automate with Bigfix.
Right now, as Jack said, there is not pre-built, click-and-deploy content for Websphere. I suspect that since Bigfix is part of the IBM Tivoli umbrella that they will eventually provide Websphere “canned” content. That doesn’t stop you from creating and calling your own fixlets for any of these fixpacks or any other custom scripting that you have done.
kdsimms, Anything that you repeat over and over in your Websphere environment can be scripted. Those scripts can be initiated by Bigfix if desired. We have run Websphere for years (since 3.5). There are some scripts for Websphere that we automate with Bigfix.
Right now, as Jack said, there is not pre-built, click-and-deploy content for Websphere. I suspect that since Bigfix is part of the IBM Tivoli umbrella that they will eventually provide Websphere “canned” content. That doesn’t stop you from creating and calling your own fixlets for any of these fixpacks or any other custom scripting that you have done.
At this time, is there going to be knonw fixlets for fixpacks in the future?
