Patch Management Life Cycle

The following list presents the primary functions of a patch management life cycle:

Following a formal patch management strategy.
You should develop and follow a formal patch management strategy, incorporating the appropriate concepts to meet your availability needs. Ideally, your strategy should include proactive patching, reactive patching, and a separate plan for security patches. These topics are described later in this chapter.
Identifying and acquiring patches.
First, determine which patches you need in various circumstances:
- If you encounter a problem, you must determine which patches you need to resolve it.
- Monitor the systems regularly to determine whether there are security patches or critical patches available for a system, or whether warnings have been issued against installed patches.
  The HP-UX Software Assistant (SWA) Tool can help you identify security patches applicable to systems, as well as patches with warnings. For more information, see Chapter 9: “Using HP-UX Software Assistant for Patch Management”.
  If you download patches using the HP IT Resource Center (ITRC), you will be sent an email notification if a warning is issued against any patch you downloaded. For more information, see Chapter 6: “Using the IT Resource Center”.
- Determine whether the patches chosen for installation require additional patches or other software to satisfy dependencies. The ITRC Patch Database can help you with this task.
Second, use standard HP-UX patch bundles as your starting point:
- HP provides standard HP-UX patch bundles including the Quality Pack (QPK) and Hardware Enablement (HWE) patch bundles. The QPK consists of defect fixes and the HWE consists of patches that are required for new hardware products. These bundles generally consist of all recommended patches. This provides a convenient and timesaving starting point to acquire patches. Simply download the bundles from the ITRC or your latest HP media.
- If you have constructed a list of patch needs, compare that with the patches in your selected bundles. If you are missing patches from your list, obtain them individually using the ITRC Patch Database.
- For more information about standard HP-UX patch bundles, see Chapter 5: “What Are Standard HP-UX Patch Bundles?”.
Deploying patches.
- Patch testing.
  You should install the patches on one or more levels of preproduction systems and perform testing. Testing is discussed in more detail later in this chapter.
- Planning deployment.
  Determine the details regarding how the installation of the patches will occur on production systems. The frequency and timing of patch installation maintenance windows must be chosen to meet with particular system down time limitations and the need to install the new patches. You might choose the timing of patching to coincide with your current maintenance windows. However, for reactive patching, you may be required to use unscheduled maintenance. For proactive patching, common intervals are quarterly, every other quarter, and yearly. You should also consider the availability of new patches and, if you are using standard HP-UX patch bundles, you will likely want to choose a schedule that in some way coincides with the release dates of new bundles.
  Some specific criteria to consider when plannning your change:
  Backup of your system.
  System down time.
  When are your maintenance windows? What length of time are they?
  In the event of patches causing negative side effects, what steps will you take to back out changes, and how long will it take to execute these steps?
- Installing patches.
  Review Special Installation Instructions.
  Prior to beginning the process of patch installation, review the patches to be installed to find any associated Special Installation Instructions.
  Install patches on the systems.
  Verify patches.
  Verify that the patches installed correctly and that the patch had the desired effect.
  Recover disk space.
  If disk space is an issue, you may find that you need to commit patches. This process recovers disk space consumed by files that were saved to allow patch rollback. Your organization should develop a formal plan to determine when and how patches should be committed. See Chapter 3: “HP-UX Patch Overview” for more information.
Tracking the patch levels of the systems. (Patch level refers to the set of active patches on the system.)
- Patch level is important when determining which patches are needed on each system.
- You need to know the patch levels of the systems when interpreting patch testing results.
- If you need to open a support call, you may be asked for the current patch level to aid in troubleshooting.
You should keep all similarly configured production systems at the same patch level.
Managing patch-related changes to systems.
- You may find it helpful to log all patch-related system changes.
- You may find it helpful to document the results of patch testing and installation.
- Many customers find it helpful to have a formal change-request process associated with their patch management process.

Patch Management Life Cycle

Technical documentation

» Table of Contents

» Glossary

» Index