March 23, 2012 at 2:59 pm
Here we go ...
OS & Security patching
- 3rd Saturday of odd numbered months 7:00 pm to 12:00 am - all development and test servers
- 3rd Saturday of even numbered months 7:00 pm to 12:00 am - all production and disaster recovery servers
SQL Server Service Pack patching
- typically once a year spanning the 2nd and 4th Saturdays 7:00 pm to 12:00 am
SQL Server Service Cumulative Update patching
- typically once a year spanning the 2nd and 4th Saturdays 7:00 pm to 12:00 am
Critical system reboots/patching (usually clusters)
- 4th Saturday of the month 10:00 pm to 12:00 am
RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."
March 24, 2012 at 8:43 pm
At Neos we had a simple rule: if a customer had a problem, we would fix it as fast as possible. Of course for that to make sense we should have had proper planned maintenance (to cover OS, DB and other platform software, plus bug fixes - not new features - for all our apps).
When I joined, we had nothing in our customer contracts that provided maintenance time: there was a 24/7 commitment with no maintenance time provision. That made life just about impossible.
I managed to get the sales people to change the standard contract to require a slot each month in which MS updates[*] relevant to servers and other minor updates could be installed - but I couldn't get a fixed time, the rule was that we had to apply to the customer for a slot and take whenever they offered; some customers tried to game this by not offereing any slot, but I can, when necessary, threaten quite convincingly to play hardball so that generally wasn't a problem. However it did mean we had to cope with the slots allocated, regardless of peoples' normal working times. This led to some quiote amusing conversations with customers. Client updates were pretty irrelevant (we had cliemts hard locked down. running our own shell not an MS one, with no enabled admin users, and effectively state-free, so that the only way to change things was in theory to reimage; however MS security was so sloppy that we had to do some extra bits there too, but there was no client maintenance other than re-image, which we did only for major feature upgrades.
[*] We checked all MS updates by reading and understanding the blurb, and then testing thoroughly in-house on several configurations for those we felt were OK; most were installed at a customer site in the first maintenance slot not less than 10 days after MS issued them, but some took months before we let them out (the longest was a server OS service pack - I can't remember which OS or which service pack).
When I look at people who have a weekly slot at a fixed time and think they are hard done by because it's only an hour (or whatever) my reactin is something like "these guys don't know they are born". :w00t:
Tom
March 26, 2012 at 2:12 am
The third Friday of every month is "Patch Friday" from 4p.m. through to Saturday when windows patches, any sql CU and any apps releases that need full business downtime all get done. We work full formal flexitime anyway so this adds to either flexi credit or can be overtime if agreed in advance.
Other apps with less users get promoted to live with advance agreement from those users for some downtime at a convenient time.
March 27, 2012 at 9:21 am
Our window is 6 PM to 9 PM (sometimes midnight depending on how complex) Sunday evenings. I hate it during football season, but it works most of the time.
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