Second, use standard HP-UX patch bundles as your starting point:

•HP provides standard HP-UX patch bundles including the Quality Pack (QPK), Hardware Enablement (HWE), and Feature Enablement Patch Bundle (FEATURE11i) patch bundles.

The QPK consists of defect fixes and the HWE consists of patches that are required for new hardware products.

The FEATURE11i bundle enables new features and enhancements to the HP-UX operating system and applications by providing the complete, minimal set of patches required.

—New HP-UX operating system features and enhancements sometimes require the selection of a “key patch.” For example, to enable the Locality-Optimized Resource Alignment (LORA) feature you must select the key patch PHKL_38980, which will then automatically select all dependent patches. See the Feature Enablement Patch Bundle section in the HP-UX Release Notes for a list of enhancements and features included in your FEATURE11i bundle.

—When installing applications from AR media, patches satisfying those applications' dependencies are automatically selected from the FEATURE11i bundle on the AR media. This process works with any application that lists patch dependencies as corequisites. For this reason, FEATURE11i is the only standard patch bundle included on the AR media, as well as the OE media.

The patches in these patch bundles are tested extensively with the latest OE Update Release, so HP can recommend these patch bundles as a starting point when acquiring patches for your needs. Simply download the bundles from the ITRC or your latest HP media.

FEATURE11i, HWE, and QPK bundles are delivered on the HP-UX 11i v3 OEUR media. HP-UX 11i v3 and v2 AR media also include the FEATURE11i bundle. QPK bundles can be found on the 11i v2 Support Pack media and the HP-UX 11i v1 Support Plus media .

For more information about standard HP-UX patch bundles, see Chapter 5: “What are standard HP-UX patch bundles?” (page 52).

•If you have constructed a list of patch needs, compare that with the patches in your selected bundles. If you are missing patches from your list, obtain them individually using the ITRC Patch Database.

3.Deploying patches.

•Patch testing.

You should install the patches on one or more levels of preproduction systems and perform testing. Testing is discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

•Planning deployment.

Determine the details regarding how the installation of the patches will occur on production systems. The frequency and timing of patch installation maintenance windows must be chosen to meet with particular system down time limitations and the need to install the new patches. You might choose the timing of patching to coincide with your current maintenance windows. However, for reactive patching, you might be required to use unscheduled maintenance. For proactive patching, common intervals are quarterly, every other quarter, and yearly. You should also consider the availability of new patches and, if you are using standard HP-UX patch bundles, you will likely want to choose a schedule that in some way coincides with the release dates of new bundles.

Patch management life cycle 43