Load concern updating Support Paks to numerous servers

[Anthony_67]

Hi again

Im looking at using CIM to update all our servers to Support Pak V6.4. Is there a best practice when it comes to the amount of servers you can update in one hit?

Q1) Can I install to 50 servers in one go or should I distribute in smaller groups? The CIM servers NIC is 1000 Full Duplex.

Q2) Does CIM install simultaneously to multiple servers or does it do 1 server then
go to the next etc

Thanks
Anthony

[Greg Hooper_1]

Anthony,

I'm not the expert on this, as I am still testing it myself, but I will share what I have experienced.

I recently pushed to about 50 servers locally at our HQ and it worked fairly well, but I would recommend smaller batches of maybe 20 at a time, simply because it is easier to manage the errors that crop up. Especially if you are deploying across the WAN. Also, I had several machines (all DL360's) that had the NIC teaming agents all jacked up on reboot. It seemed there was a conflict with some of the older agents going to 6.4. I ended up having to roll back a few servers to 6.3 to get the teaming agents to work again and communicate on the network. We have several servers using switch-assisted load balancing on both NIC's.

This is common sense, but I did not consider it before the last deployment. I would suggest getting all your machines to the exact same Support Pack level before you do a mass deployment with CIM. That way your errors (and you will have some) should be more consistent.

A long answer for Q1, sorry. My CIM server is a DL360 with teamed 100 Full NIC's, and I have had no performance issues.

Q2 - It appears to me that it installs on two or three machines at a time, (based on the sort order in your query) and then goes on.

Good luck.