Just got off a call with Dell, and they have a program to work with outside vendors of patch management products. Will Bigfix be implementing this with Dell ? This includes, BIOS updates, Firmware, Drivers, etc… There is a catalog that they publish and the packages themselves. I’d really like to see this in the Bigfix product!
I’m going to change my stance on this. Dell provides tools we use to sucessfully maintain their servers. I would rather see BigFix focus on what it already does best and continue making the product even better; I wouldn’t want development for this to draw resources away from that mission. Yes, it would be nice for us to have it integrated with BigFix but this, for us at least, is a “nice to have” but not a “need to have”.
Well, in this case, Firmware updates, BIOS updates, RAID driver updates are all patches. I’d rather have ONE platform to patch my infrastructure than two or three. Some other products already support DELL update packages (like Microsoft’s offering.) IMO, it makes sense for Bigfix to pursue this.
I’d at least like to see them support installing and updating the DELL / HP agents. But I agree that one management platform is better than two or three. That’s why we chose BigFix in the first place. If all we wanted was Windows, we would have gone elsewhere. We needed Solaris and Linux as well. So here is my thread bump which will hopefully generate more support.
The logic behind which server needs the patch is where the hard part lies for us. We just don’t have time to maintain this, much like we don’t have time to write MS patch logic. It would be a huge benefit. Openmanage is not quite what it needs to be and it is a seperate tool.