Summary: Sun equivalent of Redhat Satellite (for centralized patch management)

From: sunhux G <sunhux_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri Feb 20 2009 - 07:21:31 EST
Thanks Brett, Musa and Maciej.

Below are their replies :

**********************************************************************************


> a) if it's free of charge or what's the initial cost (excluding the
> hardware)
>     and the annual subscription like?
>
It is not free.  There is an initial cost and an annual subscription,
the costs vary on what OS is on the machines.
> b) Is this limited to Recommended / jumbo patches only or any little
>     vulnerability that's just released will be addressed by this patch
>     management product
>
Any patch, package even your own custom packages and files.
> c)suppose I have multiple versions of Solaris and several versions of
Redhat
>    Linux in our environment, can it patch them all?
>
Yes.
> d) I know Redhat Satellite requires annual subscription to Redhat, so
> supposedly
>    this Sun product needs subscription to Redhat as well?
>
The sun product can use your Redhat support subscription to fetch the
updates from Redhat and deploy them to your RHEL machines.  You need a
Sun support subscription to fetch the patches from sun
> e)appreciate any comparison between Redhat Satellite vs this Sun product
>
I cannot give you one but we have been very happy with the Sun
product.  It allows us to manage our patching, baseline and report on
machines in a simple and consistent manner.  If you have a reasonable
number of Sun machines then it is worth your while getting UCE to
manage the patches though you may want to hold off trying to buy UCE
because the functionality is apparently being rolling into the xVM
Opscenter product.
========================================================
Hello U,
Sun's current product based on  now named 'xVM Ops Center'[1].
- I don't know what's the cost, I only know that it's not free
- It's still under development
- It can install any patchset you want (not only 10_Recommended)
- It can manage configuration files, packages and patches
- I can manage RedHat as well as Solaris, but I haven't managed any
Linux systems with it
The above features look nice, but my team decided not to use it after
all. The main reason was lack of possibilities of integrating Ops
Center with other bits of infrastructure. Sun seem to concentrate
heavily on the GUI. The first version of Ops Center has a desktop
application written in Java, which has a pretty cumbersome GUI. There
is a command-line tool, but it's so slow, it's not actually usable.
The second version of Ops Center (2.0?) has a better, web-based GUI,
but it still lacks any API. There was some API for other bits of xVM,
but I couldn't find anything relevant to the Ops Center (xVM seems to
be suite of products, Ops Center is one of them). Link [2] shows
something promising (com.sun.xvm.services.opscenter) but my company
was asking Sun about Ops Center API for over half a year, and Sun
haven't come up with anything concrete. The Ops Center API still seems
to be only a promise.
One more problem with Ops Center is that it doesn't support Live
Upgrade. It brings the system to single user mode when patching. It
wasn't acceptable in my infrastructure, and in effect I couldn't use
Ops Center for patching.
My team ended up not using Ops Center. Patching is done with a custom
set of scripts (supporting only Solaris), configuration management is
done with Puppet (supporting both Linux and Solaris). We haven't
solved package management yet, the plan is to build a package
repository based on CSW and a custom set of scripts to deploy
packages.

[1] http://www.sun.com/software/products/xvmopscenter/index.jsp
[2] http://wikis.sun.com/display/xvmOC2dot0/List+of+Public+APIs
Maciej
===================================================
We tried to use sun
connection/patch pro with Opsware. We didn't have much success but there
were other factors not sun connection/patch pro. But you have to remember
Sun connection/patch pro does not do recommended patch clusters. It checks
each individual box and then checks the patchdiag.xref file and then
applies the patches that are applicable to that box. So on V240 it might
apply 200 patches but on T2000 it might only apply 100 patches. Sun
connection/patch pro is all good but it depends heavily on Java. Each
version of Sun connection/patch pro requires some basic Java version. If
you applications on the server does not relies on specific version of Java
then you can go ahead but if not then you have to look for workaround. The
basic Sun connection/patch pro will connect directly to Sunsolve server,
you will have to reconfigure it to point to your in house patching repo
server.
regards
Nitin

==================================================

There is a product called XvM OpsCenter, which is not free.  You can get
more information from
http://www.sun.com/software/products/xvmopscenter/podcasts.jsp
Another product, though not Sun based (nor supported by Sun) but is free is
CFEngine:  http://www.cfengine.org/about.php
We had a demo of OpsCenter, which failed miserably in our environment (due
to our improper utilization/installation of updates) but cfengine works fine
And "yes", if you plan to implement OpsCenter, you will need a Redhat
subscription in order to use the updates.
Musa

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:50 PM, sunhux G <sunhux@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
> Saw this :
>
> Sun has had a solution available for some time that can patch Solaris,
> SuSE and Red Hat systems:
>  http://www.sun.com/service/sunconnection/index.jsp
> Has anyone used the above Sun's product?
>
> Would like to know :
>
> a) if it's free of charge or what's the initial cost (excluding the
> hardware)
>     and the annual subscription like?
>
> b) Is this limited to Recommended / jumbo patches only or any little
>     vulnerability that's just released will be addressed by this patch
>     management product
>
> c)suppose I have multiple versions of Solaris and several versions of
> Redhat
>    Linux in our environment, can it patch them all?
>
> d) I know Redhat Satellite requires annual subscription to Redhat, so
> supposedly
>    this Sun product needs subscription to Redhat as well?
>
> e)appreciate any comparison between Redhat Satellite vs this Sun product
>
>
> Thanks
> U
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Received on Fri Feb 20 07:21:45 2009

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