HP Server Automation provides excellent features that increases the efficiency of IT staff, improves compliance and system security, and requires minimal user interaction. Server Automation achieves this using a combination of Audits, Audit Policies, Patches and Patch Policies, System Configuration specifications, software packages, and even OS Build Plans. This allows IT staff to automate significant workloads using Server Automation and eliminate incessant problems such as forgetting to perform a specific step, confirming a system’s configuration is complete, or just trying to track down a piece of software to install. HP Server Automation (SA) alleviates these problems and simplifies processes down to only a few clicks to achieve what could take hours or days to perform manually. Thus, in efforts to demonstrate some of SA’s most attractive features the following provides a quick look into the SA patch policies to install patches, run audits, and even remediate non-compliant systems quickly.
How to Create Policies and View Compliance
Server Automation includes Software Policies, Patch Policies, and Audit Policies containing as many settings one desires. However, a best practice is to group policies by some common factor. For instance, creating a patch policy to deploy the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool along with another patch that installs an update for a RAID controller just is not a good idea. But one can still add and group as many policies into a patch and audit policy as necessary and use SA’s hierarchical views to manage everything from the library of patches, patch policies, OS build plans, plus managed or unmanaged servers making navigation in SA’s library very simple. Even better, just the patch library alone provides a collection of every vendor published patch available and options that control patch availability (testing or available to the entire company). Then, by creating a patch policy, SA administrators can automate the entire process and still control which systems patches install on using device groups. Last, SA automatically runs a compliance scan and forwards results along with any remediation job statuses via e-mail while maintaining a database of every job.
