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Managing VMs Before and After Patching with Beekeeper Patch Automation Software
Whether you use Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere as your hypervisor, Beekeeper patching automation can help manage the VMs before and after patching. VM validations include:
- Starting VMs
- Taking snapshots or checkpoints
- Reverting to snapshots or checkpoints
- Merging snapshots or checkpoints
- Cloning or exporting VMs
- Shutting down VMs
- Live migrating VMs when patching the Hyper-V host
You can add these validations to your patching process so you are automatically covered when it comes to compliance and VM configuration even after applying patches. Automating these processes is Beekeeper's specialty.
When patching a Hyper-V cluster, you can Live-Migrate the VMs from the host being patched to another host in the cluster. As part of our Hyper-V Validation Pack, these scripts can be used as Pre-Maintenance and Post-Maintenance tasks.
By adding the scripts as validation task, you make them available in Beekeeper. Just paste the contents of the file into the Script window:
You need to add the validation tasks as Pre Node Maintenance and Post Node Maintenance tasks to the Hyper-V cluster record:
This will move the VMs on the node being patched to another node in the cluster. Example of the History log:
Before you use these validations, make sure that you have set the preferred owner for each VM so that the VMs can be moved back to the appropriate node in the cluster.
The Live-Migrate scripts are in our GitHub repository:
