ZENworks provides two different ways to patch your Linux devices:
Patch Management is a fully integrated feature of ZENworks that provides an agent-based patch, a vulnerability patch, and a compliance management solution.
Patch Management provides the following capabilities:
It uses signatures to determine the required patches and reports them back for easy reporting.
It implements mandatory baselines for certain patches to always be present on a device.
It patches only the SLES and RHEL distributions.
For more information, see the ZENworks 2017 Patch Management Reference.
Linux Package Management is intended to handle the package management functionality of ZENworks Configuration Management for Linux devices (servers and desktops).
Linux Package Management provides the following capabilities:
It provides single point management for patching, installing, and updating packages for large number of Linux devices at an enterprise level.
It mirrors updates and packages from the NU, RHN, RCE, and YUM repositories for patches and packages as ZENworks bundles. You can assign these bundles to Linux managed devices for package management.
It supports the download of delta RPMs on the managed devices whenever the delta RPMs are available and applicable, thereby reducing the bandwidth required when patching.
It allows you to choose the catalogs, packages, and bundles that you want to mirror.
It allows you to patch OES servers.