ZENworks 11.4.2 Patch Management speeds up performance and adds three new features: SLES 12 patch support, patch policy notification and cancel options, and a configuration option to clean up old patch bundles.
Performance improvements include pre-computed responses to speed up server performance and enhanced vulnerability detection to speed up client performance.
When the number of patches within a given Patch Policy increases to a sizeable amount, the load on the ZENworks Server is high as it needs to cater to on-demand Patch Policy computation requests from every managed device. This in turn results in an increased response time between the ZENworks server and the managed device.
To address these issues, Patch Policies are now pre-computed, which eliminates the need for on-demand computation requests. These pre-computed responses are compressed and saved in the database. This reduces the size of the data transferred from the ZENworks server to the managed device, thereby improving the capability of the ZENworks server to apply patches on the managed device.
In order to benefit from this feature, this update has to be applied to the managed devices as well.
Patch detections now complete more quickly due to some behind-the-scene improvements that increase the speed of patch detections.
This release adds patch support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.To patch these endpoints, register your endpoints using YaST, register them with SUSE Customer Center, and then add your Customer Center credentials to the Subscription Service Settings.
When configuring a patch policy deployment, you can now configure the deployment to notify users that a new patch policy is being applied to their workstation. Additionally, you can configure the patch policy to allows users to cancel application of the policy.
ZENworks Patch Management now features an option that automatically deletes old patches for previous deployments. Use this feature to prevent cached patches from consuming excessive disk space on your server.
Five new reports are available for Patch Management in ZENworks 11 SP4 update 2.
DAU Status: Includes a pie chart that shows how many days since the Discover Applicable Updates (DAU) task was run on agents in the management zone (those greater than 7 days and those from 1-3 days).
Device Status: Provides a date-time stamp by device name for the following status indicators: Last Contact Date, Last Full Refresh, Last Inventory Scan, and Last DAU.
Overall Patch Percentage: Lists the total number of devices, Patched and Not Patched, with their respective percentages. The percentages are also reflected in a pie chart.
Patch Percentage by Folder: Shows the number of devices patched and not patched in each folder with a percentage of those not patched.
Not-Patched Patches by Device: Provides a table for each device in the management zone that shows patches that are not patched, to include patch names, release dates, impacts, and vendors.
NOTE:After updating or installing ZENworks 11.4.2, you will need to configure the ZENworks Reporting Appliance to have access to the new reports. See Reconfiguring ZENworks Reporting in the ZENworks Reporting Appliance 5.6.1 Deployment and Administration Reference.