Feature Reqeusts

[doug]

Hi Nick – It’s great to hear that BP is working so well vs what you had with SCCM! We love to hear that kind of stuff.

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The “do not patch server Y until server X is done” functionality is already available in BatchPatch. Please see the following links for a description and tutorials. The second link is a tutorial for one possible way to use the feature but I think it will be helpful even if you are not dealing specifically with virtual machine guest/host sequences.

Advanced Multi-Row Queue Sequence

Virtual Machine Guest host Update and Reboot Sequence Automation

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The task scheduler randomization option makes sense. We have on our to-do list already something very similar to what you are describing, but I’m not sure of when this will be available. That said, 150 machines is actually not that many for the system running BatchPatch, even when it’s just a workstation class machine. I mean… yes it’s a lot, but we have customers doing thousands all at once, if you can believe it. I have personally done several hundred at once running BP on a standard quad-core workstation with 8GB of RAM without any real issues. So, I think generally you should be fine scheduling all 150 tasks to execute at the same time. The worst thing that can happen is the GUI becomes a bit less responsive for a few minutes, particularly while the tasks are first being launched. However, the actual tasks should generally complete without issues.

Also, if you really still wanted to break it up and didn’t want to use the ‘concurrent thread max’ setting, you could schedule 50 machines for time X, 50 machines for time X+5, and 50 machines for time X=10 (or something along those lines, at least)

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The email notifications can be customized/overridden on a per-row basis. Highlight the hosts that you want to override the default notification setting for, and select ‘Actions > Email notification > Override default email notification settings’

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I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions, comments, or problems.

-Doug

[NickSmith]

Ah, thank you for the response!

I did want to reply to the 150 machines at once bit. I understand it is not that many (over all we are closer to 1000ish total). However, due to other circumstances in our environment, there are a few commands I have to run before the patching actually begins. Sending a whole bunch of remote commands at once, even to as little as 50 rows at once does still bog the system down. However the actual process of patching the load is much lower. Basically at the start of a scheduled window, I bog the machine down with launching 5 remote commands across 50 systems at once, once that initial bogging is cleared up, it runs very smoothly. Once I get those issues in our environment worked out to where I don’t have to issue commands to make sure the server is using the correct SUS server and can just issue the patching command, I expect this issue to pretty much go away.

I had meant to reply and mention I found the override settings for the email, but I hadn’t found that bit about the first part of my post. Thank you much! I’ve since recommended it to other IT departments across campus who are having issues with their SCCM setups as well. Seems any IT group that does servers on campus is having this same issue and we all pretty much decided to stop pulling our hair out over it at about the same time 🙂

[doug]

Hi Nick – I’d be curious to get more detail from you about the “launching 5 remote commands across 50 systems at once.” What do you mean by this? How are you executing 5 commands at once? What are the commands? Which ‘Remote Command’ action in BatchPatch are you using? There normally should not be any “bogging” like you describe, so I’m hoping we can identify the exact problem so that we can then fix it. The more detail you are able to provide about the exact steps you are taking and the exact menu items you are clicking to launch this process, the more likely we’ll be able to reproduce the issue. If we cannot reproduce it, then it will be tough to fix.

Thanks!

-Doug

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