Maintenance Schedules and Change Freezes

[Rick Mann]

Has anyone started using the Maintenance Schedule plug-in that was part of the fall 2009 release? We are looking to leverage the new plug-in in a couple of ways:

1. Creating a standard maintenance window for our CI's in Configuration.

2. Creating a "Year End Change Freeze" schedule.

Is it possible to assign multiple schedules to one CI? Also, I noticed that you can assign parent schedules to other maintenance schedules. What is the concept on this? Does the parent schedule override the child? I can't seem to find any documentation.

Any help/advice is most appreciated. Thanks

Rick

[cdeclos]

Hi Rick

I was also looking into this exciting option to schedule the Operating System maintenance on our SAP servers landscape on a monthly base. Typically, this task involves several sub-tasks like installing the updates on a non-critical server, rebooting the server, validating the installation (with approval from the appropriate group). If approved, the updates must then be installed on the Production & Development servers which in turn must be rebooted and checked afterwards at a defined time. In other words, is there a way to generate tasks from the maintenance schedule or bind them to it ?

Christian

[shris]

Hi.

I just turned it on in one of my environments to try it out--this afternoon.

OOB, #1 and #2 are what it's for.

OOB there seems to be only one schedule slot per CI. However, the schedule itself can have multiple entries. What I am seeing is that you put in the times when changes are *allowed*.

We use different calendars in different parts of the org. One uses a 'freeze' concept around fiscal month end, quarter end, and year end. For that, my schedule would include the time *between* the freezes, when changes are allowed. Another part of the org uses a 'maintenance window' that's something along the lines of the third weekend each month. For that one, my schedule includes the specified weekends.

I have not seen anything on parent/child schedules in my 20 minutes of poking around. What I have seen is that you have one 'schedule' with multiple 'schedule entries' that define your 'allowed time'. So, since our fiscal month end has nothing to do with calendar months, I can stick each 'allowed chunk' in there as a separate item (since they don't repeat). With the 'third weekend' schedule, I can have just one item because the repeat seems to handle the 'third weekend' concept just fine.

I haven't quite figured out what some of the fields on a 'schedule entry' are for. The documentation on the 'type' field, for example, is very slim.

Anyway, this plugin is so exactly what I needed I'm putting it into my golden environment Real Soon Now.

shris

[rcunning]

Yes, the "type" field choices for Schedule Entries are not documented anywhere that I have seen.

Anyone have any insight/experience/testing on this?

Thanks!

[nvidato]

Is there a way to tie the maintenace window to Incident Management ? I don't want the SLA to run during the maintenance window? We have nightly maintenace windows.