Vendor Hardware - Device Drivers, Software and BIOS control

General
1

I am not sure if this exists or is a feature request.
Our use case is that we want our regular maintenance to be during business hours, to take advantage of online machines. And the software being updated is non-intrusive.
For vendor hardware (drivers, software, bios) we would like to have more control over this.
A recent example is updating nvidia graphics driver

  • schedule or on demand deployment after hours
  • allow user to dismiss if required
  • select what needs to be installed. eg. display driver only or bios only
2

Not sure what’s missing from Immy that you’re requesting?

  1. Immy has the ability to schedule or do ad-hoc (on demand) deployment.
  2. If you make use of the “Get Maintenance Consent From Logged In User” task, you can accomplish this.
  3. The Dell Command Update/HP Image Assistant have these parameters.

Doing firmware/driver updates from vendors is most definitely intrusive and often requires a reboot to complete.

3

Ideally, I would like to have a different schedule for device maintenance, so we can schedule it once a month and/or associate it with tags.
I agree that having it run at the end of typical daily maintenance is possible but it also introduces risk every day that the user may do it, rather than having it isolated to a certain period of the month.

4

Not sure I understand how this approach provides any advantages?

We run driver/Dell/Lenovo/HP updates with every maintenance cycle in a schedule. Not sure I understand how doing those things separately “reduces risk,” as we have not had any issues with running full maintenance once a month, other than the occasional bad/broken driver (count on one hand in the last 2 years) which would happen regardless of when it was scheduled.

The “non-Immy-related” comment here is that our experience is that clients generally see the monthly maintenance window as necessary, but inconvenient. Our clients want fewer inconveniences, and creating more maintenance cycles unnecessarily only increases the inconvenience to the client. We schedule all maintenance windows to be the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday of any given month, so we have small groups of clients with maintenance windows every day which provide us and our clients in general with multiple benefits:

  1. It is someones specific job to look at all servers and reports the morning after maintenance.
  2. If there is an update (of ANY kind) that causes an issue:
    a) that update will be limited to that small set of clients
    b) we can modify the deployments as appropriate to avoid and/or deal with the issues for subsequent maintenance runs.
  3. The previous two benefits, along with the staggered schedule result in a third benefit of making the maintenance checks and reducing the risk of having to deal with bad updates much, much more manageable than it has ever been for us.
3 Likes
5

Thanks @DimitriRodis. The methodology makes quite a bit of sense, I will give it a shot internally.
I had not yet given staggered scheduling much thought, this is good to have figured out before it gets too cumbersome. Much appreciated!

6

Glad you found that helpful.

Only thing I would add to this–since I don’t schedule maintenance on the weekends, that leaves the weekends open for anything that was postponed/missed, or that I need to do on a scheduled or ad-hoc mass basis that may consume all of the Immy session slots.

1 Like