Shhhhhh! If I keep typing quietly our marketing guys won’t hear what I’m about to tell you. I think they’re giving away something they really meant to charge for. I’ll tell you all about it, but if we ever meet and start talking about it, use my Wii Mii character name “Dadio” as a salutation.

I'm talking about IBM Systems Director’s Update Manager function. During the past nine months I’ve been presenting and showing real-time demos of IBM Systems Director and every time I get to the Update Manager function I hear the same question: “Yes, but how much does that plug-in cost?” When I say that Update Manager is built into IBM Systems Director and is available as a free download, folks usually start grinning from ear to ear because they've just seen something that could save them hours and hours of time.

In this article, I'll go into more specifics about what you need in order to use Update Manager, how to get started, and how it works. If you've never used IBM Systems Director before, give it a try. It doesn't take long to set up, especially for IBM i users, and you can try it out to see if it works for you.

IBM Systems Director

IBM Systems Director, IBM's next-generation systems management application, is available at no additional charge from ibm.com (see below for link). It has been available since October 2008 and has been updated twice already. The download includes the management server and agents. IBM Systems Director has a web-based user interface so there is nothing you need to install on your workstation in order to use it. For Power Systems users, it is important to note that the management server can be installed on AIX, power Linux, and Windows, but not IBM i. However, the IBM Systems Director can manage IBM i very well and the agent is shipped with the operating system.

IBM Systems Director comes with many out-of-the-box plug-ins that help you manage your data center, including Status Manager, Automation Manager, Virtualization Manager, and, of course, Update Manager. There are also optional plug-ins for a fee, including Active Energy Manager. You can find details on the IBM web site.

Update Manager Summary

One of the most common needs of a systems administrator is to update systems in the datacenter. Update Manager can update the firmware for your Power Systems, System x and BladeCenter systems, and HMCs; it also can update AIX, Linux, and IBM i operating systems. Update Manager can also update any IBM Systems Director plug-in, so it has a level of self-maintenance. See the sidebar "Categories Checked by Update Manager" for the full list of update categories you can manage.

To help you update the systems as needed, Update Manager can check IBM for the latest updates for the category you want. You can then have them downloaded and installed or even stage your install to reduce the hit on your network. Additionally, you can set up compliance so that Update Manager will regularly check IBM for the latest updates you want and notify you if new updates are available.

IBM’s information center has a rich section of what hardware is supported across Power Systems, System x, and BladeCenter, but here are some details regarding your IBM i environment:

• To update your HMC firmware, make sure it is at 7.3.3 SP2 or later
• To update your Power Systems firmware, you can update any p5 or p6 that matches one of the following rules:
• If it is not managed by HMC or IVM, make sure it is running AIX or Linux, and that the operating system has the Common Agent installed.
• If it is managed by HMC or IVM, you are set.
• To update your IBM i operating system, make sure it is at V5R4 or later, and that the operating system has the IBM Systems Director agent installed.

An additional note: for those of you who are running Linux, Update Manager supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 5 and SUSE Linux SLES Version 10. Make sure the common agent is installed and has root level access. Additionally, each system you want to update needs to be known by the distributions update service. Go to the Red Hat and SUSE web sites for more details:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: https://rhn.redhat.com
• SUSE Linux SLES: http://www.novell.com/customercenter

Using Update Manager

The first thing you'll want to do is to open the Update Manager summary page (Figure 1). As you can see in the summary page you can manage your updates in one of three ways. The first way is by setting up compliance. This means that Update Manager will compare the updates you have installed on your systems with what ibm.com says are needed. If Update Manager finds that updates are needed, it will visually notify you by lighting up the compliance status. (You can also get email notifications when needed updates are found by creating an Automation Plan. To do that, click “Automation Plans” in the navigation area and then click Create. A wizard will walk you through where you can check Update events).

The simplest way to get started with compliance is to select “Getting started” in the upper right corner of the summary page. It will ask you which system you want to have Update Manager monitor, how you want to connect to IBM, and how often you want to check for updates.

That’s it. Once you are done, Update Manager will get the needed updates from ibm.com and the selected systems will be monitored for update compliance. There probably will be times when you don't want the latest updates; you'll want only certain updates, like critical security updates or IBM-recommended IBM i updates. You can set this up by adding more detailed compliance policies, which I will mention later.

If you don't want Update Manager to monitor systems and recommend updates, you can also move to the “Manage” section and check for updates yourself. The Check for Updates task provides far more flexibility regarding which kinds of updates you care about (Figure 2). For IBM i, you can choose to check for all updates, or you can check based on cumulative packages or PTF groups. In Figure 2 I chose to check IBM for all HMC updates, IBM i Security updates, and Power System firmware updates. You can't check for individual PTFs, but once a category is checked, and individual updates are listed as needed, you then choose to install an individual PTF or firmware update.

When Update Manager has finished checking IBM for updates, you can view the updates that are needed. In the summary page you'll see “Show needed updates.” This lists all the updates that are needed across your systems (Figure 3).

If you see an update you want to install yourself, you have some options. You can select the IBM i operating system, right click, and select “Release Management.” In this cascade menu you will see “Check for Updates,” “Show Needed Updates,” and “Show Installed Updates.” This will filter these tasks for just the system for which you want to view needed updates. You could also click the Install button on the global “Show needed updates” (Figure 3) and then Update Manager will install onto any system that needs these updates. Update Manager will ensure the update is needed for that particular system before trying to install it. You could also select an individual update from the “Needed Updates” task and choose “All Systems.” That will install just that update onto all systems that need it.

Note: For most data centers, network traffic needs to be managed just as tightly as updates. That is why Update Manager offers an “Installation Staging” where you can schedule the distribution of the update files to the managed systems where the install will happen when the network is not so busy. Then at a later time you can run the Install wizard. Because the files will already be at the staging area, when you run the Install task, it will be performed more quickly and it can reduce downtime of your system.

Regardless of how you stage the install, some IBM i updates require the system to be restarted. We leave that to you. Update Manager knows when the updates are installed, but some updates may require an operating system restart to be fully activated. Finally, Update Manager offers to uninstall individual updates or groups of updates for any reason, as long as the update is not permanently installed.

Compliance

Earlier I mentioned that the “Getting started” wizard sets up basic compliance for systems you care about. When you finish the wizard, the summary page updates the Compliance section and shows the systems under compliance (Figure 4).

If you want to get more detailed in your update compliance monitoring, you can customize a fair amount. If you click the “5 systems” link from figure 4 you'll see a list of systems that are under compliance (or find a system anywhere in IBM Systems Director). If you right-click one of them, then select “Systems Status and Health > Compliance Policy,” you'll see all the policies in use. In Figure 5, you'll see there is one policy for my HMC that was the name I used from the getting started wizard.

If I want, I can add an additional policy. The policy function uses a union of all policies, so realistically if you want to be more specific about what Update Manager monitors for compliance, you'll want to remove this general-purpose policy from the setup wizard and add your own.

In Figure 6, I have selected my IBM i operating system and have customized it so only the IBM-recommended updates will be considered in compliance monitoring.

Once compliance is set up the way you want it, you're free to do other work until Update Manager notifies you that updates you care about are available. Once you see that a system is not in compliance, right click the system and select “System Status and Health > Compliance Issues” (or just click the compliance status on any table). This will show a table of all updates that are needed and recommendations for what to do.

Available Resources

I hope you take time to explore Update Manager to see if IBM Systems Director is a good fit for managing updates for the systems in your datacenter. For more information, visit the IBM information center.

IBM Systems Director web site:
http://www.ibm.com/systems/management/director/

IBM Systems Director download site:
http://www.ibm.com/systems/management/director/downloads/

IBM Information Center – Systems Director 6.11 content:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/systems/director_6.1/fqm0_main....

Greg Hintermeister [gregh@us.ibm.com] works at IBM as a user experience designer and is an IBM master inventor. He has extensive experience designing user interaction for IBM Systems Director, IBM Virtualization Manager, System i Navigator, mobile applications, and numerous web applications. Greg is a regular speaker at user groups and technical conferences.