TLP Concepts

This section describes the main concepts and functionality of the TLP tool.

TLP Definitions

This section defines some of the key terms that are used within TLP.

• Patch repository – Location for all of the patches that are installed on the TLP server.

• Snapshot – A set of patches that are frozen at a given point in time.

• Baseline – A tested set of patches that are frozen at a given point in time.

• Sun Baseline – A baseline that has been tested by Sun.

• Phase – A snapshot that has a color code designation and a name assigned to it.

• System-specific patch sets – A subset of a snapshot that is applicable to a specific system. This subset is also sometimes called an individual patch set or a patch set.

Patch Set Creation

The most important objective of the TLP tool is patch set creation. The tool's job is to create individual patch sets that you can easily install. One of the main components of TLP is its phase concept. A snapshot is a closed set of patches, for example a Sun Baseline or an Enterprise Installation Standards CD-ROM (EIS-CD). The snapshot is tagged with a date by the tool. A snapshot becomes a phase when a color designation and a name is assigned to it. Using historical patches ensures that the patches that are included in the snapshot have matured over time. Withdrawn patches, or bad patches, are regularly checked for and replaced in all of the snapshots. The patch analyzer is responsible for determining the applicable patches for a given system.

Patch Analysis

System analysis engines are used to analyze single system patch requirements. These analyzers gather information about installed and missing patches and provide an exact list of patches that are missing on a given system. All of these patches are applicable to the target system. The TLP tool then compares the output of the analyzer against a given baseline. TLP calculates the gap between both sets to create a system-specific patch set. TLP uses an EIS-CD to define a unique baseline for your data center. The tool takes the output of the selected baseline, and combines it with the patches on the selected baseline, to create a new patch set. You can then efficiently install these patch sets with minimal effort. In mathematical terms, this process is a simple intersection of sets. However, in practice, the process is much more complicated.

You can configure the TLP tool to run with several different external system analyzers. You can also combine two or more analyzers. Because TLP uses analysis engines to create system-specific patch sets, the number of patches that are actually installed are minimized, thus reducing required maintenance window times.

The following are examples of these external analyzers:

• PatchPro

• Sun Checkup

• Griffon

Utilization of EIS-CDs

Utilizing EIS-CDs enables you to bring all of the systems in your data center to a unique patch level, meaning that each system in the data center appears to have been installed with the underlying EIS-CD. Because the patch sets for all of the systems were created with the same baseline, these systems also appear to have gone through installation at the same time.