Well wow this reply took a long time. I was thinking along the lines of creating a schedules job that utilizes and a list of hosts and just does a simple yum update, that's how I did it back in 2006 with a large infrastructure is several hundred host and RHN Satellite. That's fairly easy to do and you set a maximum number which can be done in parallel, but if you can do scripting in any language that does XML RPC or can wrap the spacecmd tool its not too hard to do a job chain to generate the list dynamically. That said I just used Job scheduler as an open source example. The point is if you need that level of fine grains control you need a dedicated scheduler involved. Theoretically you could do it with puppet (which people have been doing with RHN Satellite and or Spacewalk for years ) as well but puppet uses a random timing on the client side to decide when to do things so its not really as smooth and predictable as you might want it to be. For that matter you could write a script that went out and adjusted the time sequentially on when the yum auto update script in /etc/cron.d executes so they don't all happen at once. Additionally you could easily download my old but still usefully MrTools project from source forge and use <a href="http://mrexec.pl" type="url">mrexec.pl</a> to execute your yum updates in a controlled manner it scales well at asynchronously running commands and or scripts on up to 400 hosts at an arbitrary number of nodes (the default is 100 ssh threads) in parallel before you need to tweak the ulimits. In any case as us Perl guys like to say there are many ways to do it, but in your case you will need to use an other tool in conjunction with Spacewalk to achieve you objective. <div style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;color: #999999;">-- Sent from my HP Pre3</div> <hr align="left" style="width:75%">On Nov 25, 2013 19:11, Michal Bruncko <michal.bruncko@zssos.sk> wrote: Hello I dont even imagine how to interconnect Jobscheduler with Spacewalk (if it is possible) and what everything else needs to be done to make it work. On the other way I am wondering if I am the only one who is aware about the described problem with batch upgrade process over all machines at once - spacewalk clients. If it is good to do it at once or not? Or how are you dealing with such upgrade tasks in your environments? Currently two issues can be observed: high resource (of virtualization host/hypervisor) utilization and service unavailability (during installation/upgrade process if affected service/daemon is subject of that process as well) even if HA is implemented on servers. Now I can only run upgrade task "now" or schedule on specific time - but it does not matter as for both cases upgrade task will begin on all selected machines at once. Nobody cares about another way of pushing upgrade tasks to clients with more distributed/moderated utilization like which is available today? thanks michal <div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 17. 11. 2013 19:33, Paul Robert Marino wrote: </div> <blockquote cite="mid:52890c10.a2c6ec0a.09dc.ffffb852@mx.google.com" type="cite">For this kind of thing I would suggest using a more robust scheduler like Jobscheduler from SOS Berlin <div style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;color: #999999;">-- Sent from my HP Pre3</div> <hr style="width:75%" align="left">On Nov 17, 2013 7:47, Michal Bruncko <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:michal.bruncko@zssos.sk"><michal.bruncko@zssos.sk></a> wrote: Hello list, I am happily using Spacewalk for managing our systems for years and I have question about clients machine upgrade process. - We are using virtualization environment where on single host are running ~20 virtual systems (and several virtualization hosts are available). - I am updating package channels one every week (just RHEL 6.x x64_86 systems) by crond script. - And for upgrading machines, I simply choose all client systems from list, click on "manage" and then on "upgrade" links and apply all relevant upgrade packages at once. but within some weeks there are lot of upgraded packages available including kernel and selinux packages, which consumes more resources of virtualization hosts like standard/other/smaller packages. If I use same upgrade process described bellow for upgrade package bundle including kernel packages, the virtualization host is obviously utilized and disk utilization increased to maximum.This results to slower service availability and I am also afraid about disk arrays if this very high utilization can cause some troubles for them. Now I am wondering if there is way to use serialized (machine-per-machine) upgrade process instead of parallel (all machine at once) process without manual intervention by admin. As I can see from upgrade wizard I can only choose to "Install updates ASAP" or "Schedule upgrade process to specified time". I also wondered about some manual upgrade process in way that I choose only some virtuals from list instead of all, but I need to identify which virtuals is hosted on which virt. host. Yes, I can create groups (of uncollision machines from different virtual host) for such upgrade to minimize disk utilization, but it is not very handy and more time by admin needs to be consumed to update all machines. Is there any other options that I have not yet recognized (i.e. using via CLI instead of WebGUI) that can help me with such problems? I am wondering about two options: 1. serializing installation per virtual machine instead of all-at-once behavior which is available now. this have advantage mainly in cases - when two redundant machines are serving same service (i.e. coroporate directory) and directory process needs to be restarted in oder to upgrade this package - which cause service unavailability at all as both virtuals will be in upgrade process at same time. 2. second way can be work similar like with clam.d process upgrade like we know - it us running on daily basis, but the upgrade process is executed in random time within next four hour from executing this script by cron process. So I am talking about choice "Upgrade randomly within XX hours/minutes per every selected machine from now". This will spread upgrade process of all selected machines randomly over defined time interval. And of course the disk utilization will be not so high utilized. What do you think about those proposals? thank you -- Ing. Michal Bruncko, PhD., CCNP, RHCSA™ IT systems and network administrator Coupled school of business and services Ruzomberok Slovak Republic _______________________________________________ Spacewalk-list mailing list <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Spacewalk-list@redhat.com">Spacewalk-list@redhat.com</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/spacewalk-list">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/spacewalk-list</a> <fieldset class="mimeAttachmentHeader"></fieldset> <pre wrap="">_______________________________________________ Spacewalk-list mailing list <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Spacewalk-list@redhat.com">Spacewalk-list@redhat.com</a> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/spacewalk-list">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/spacewalk-list</a></pre> </blockquote> </body> </html>