Client Management Suite

All,

We're in the middle of upgrading our environment to 7.1 SP2.  The platform has been upgraded, but the Patch Management clients are still running the 7.1 SP1 version of the plugin.  

We have just gotten an emergency request for patching this weekend, which doesn't leave us enough time to get the updated plugins out to those machines.

Does anyone know if Patch Management 7.1 SP2 can patch 7.1 SP1 patch management clients?

Thanks!

This should be fine.  It's not a scenario I've specifically tested, but they should be capable of running vulnerability reports, installing software resources, executing a software update cycle, etc.

I disagree that there isn't time to get the agent on the computers:

1. Test the agent upgrade on several systems, enough to give you comfort that it will work properly in the larger environment (I haven't seen issues with this)
2. Force out at an accelerated schedule, using RAADv2 to provide some immediate feedback by forcing policy updates to multiple computers using the Filter picker in RAADv2
3. Profit

Oh, there's plenty of time from a technical perspective, but to navigate our draconian change approval process- best of luck.  I was told unofficially that this scenario is unsupported, but I was looking to get feedback from someone who knew or had actually tried it.  Thanks for your help.  I'm most interested in the ability to schedule, stage, install and then run reports.

Whatever patch is being hurried out is far more likely to cause problems than an updated Patch agent. As is using an older Patch Agent (although it shouldn't cause problems).

Or, if it's just one or two patches, you could just use Software Delivery.

The company is extremely anal about change management, and there is no time to get these agents out to that environment because they have to fully go through the QA process, which will take some time. 

Does anyone have experience actually using this configuration?  

Thanks, all, for the feedback.

I reached out to my professional services team a while ago about this exact environment.  The guy I asked had personal experience with it working.  Based on that, I'll be running the same thing for a couple of weeks.  

Assuming I can ever get SP2 installed, I'm getting a SIM error that support is completely perplexed by...  *sigh*

That's what I was looking for.  Oh, and SP2 took me 3 full days to figure out, and I'm still having issues with certain things.

In January 2012, we attempted to upgrade our installation of ServiceDesk 7.1 to SP2 (7.1.2). Unfortunately, this resulted in a corrupted ServiceDesk environment. I was told by Symantec Enterprise Support that SD 7.1 SP2 requires a clean install and that no upgrade path is currently supported from a prior version. After opening a case, here is the response that I received:

Rob,

I think that the upgrade is the basis of the issue here. If you had a prior version installed and installed ServiceDesk 7.1 SP2 over it, then you definitely have a corrupted environment. Unfortunately, ServiceDesk 7.1 SP2 requires a clean install and there is no upgrade path supported from a prior installation. This is noted here:

Is there an upgrade path from older versions of ServiceDesk to ServiceDesk 7.1 SP2?

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH178051

I asked about this based on what I was seeing in the installation log. Unfortunately, I have to recommend a new installation and a new SQL database. If you would like to review this further, we can speak over the phone tomorrow if you could recommend a time.

Thank you,

Technical Support Engineer