System Management Homepage and Vulnerability and Patch Management Pack

[George Salmaniw]

Can VPMP be used alongside SMH or do you require to have SIM installed?

I am setting up a single DL360 G3 standalone server [no connection to the Internet] and require a VPMP-like solution to manage Windows 2003 patches/driver updates etc. Any suggestions to best practices for patch management on standalone W2K3 server?

[Jennifer_74]

VPM is a plug-in to HP SIM. For the latest version of VPM (1.11) you should install HP SIM 4.2 SP2 or HP SIM 5.0 (preferred) before installing VPM.

If your VPM server does not have internet access, you can install the VPM Acquisition Utility on a system that does have internet access. The utility will acquire scan updates and patches which can be imported into the VPM server.

There is a whitepaper that provides an installation checklist which you may find useful. http://h200001.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00405503/c00405503.pdf

[George Salmaniw]

Question still remains whether to install SIM for a single server to replace Systems Management Homepage? Is that standard practice [as SIM is a more robust solution to provide management for a number of servers].

[Rich Purvis · Accepted solution]

HPSIM is not a replacement for the System Management Homepage(SMH). They are part of the same solution. The SMH is a "single server" view for management purposes. So if you want to look at a single server you go to the SMH and get data and access to the management applications for that one server - you cannot see data from other servers on the SMH of another server.
If you want to see status and data from a number of servers or a "multiple server" view then that is what HPSIM is used for. In fact when you "drill down" to get more data on a single system within HPSIM it links to the SMH. They are part ofthe same solution.
That being said - as the previous poster stated VPM is a plugin to HPSIM. It requires that an installation of HPSIM be installed to run it. HPSIM does not install on every system in your network it goes on a single centralized management console that is used monitor all the other systems. Unless you have more than 5000 devices, then you may want more than one installation.
If you only want to run VPM on one system I am not sure you want to install HPSIM just for that. If you want to run VPM on a number of systems then that is something different.

-Rich