Manage Your Operating Systems

Understand and adopt procedures that keep your operating systems current with the latest OS and security patches.

View and Manage Available Security Updates

Security Architect, Cloud Operations Manager

Ensure compliance by keeping track of OS security updates and bug fixes that help address security vulnerabilities.

OS Management Hub simplifies the management and monitoring of updates for enterprise operating systems at scale across distributed and multicloud environments. You can use OS Management Hub to view and apply available security updates for your Oracle Linux instances in OCI, on-premises, and supported third-party clouds. You can also manage Windows Server instances in OCI with OS Management Hub.

Use Oracle Ksplice to apply critical security updates to the Oracle Linux kernel and user space libraries (glibc and OpenSSL) without requiring a reboot. In Oracle Linux, Ksplice also updates the glibc and OpenSSL user space libraries and applies critical security patches without disrupting workloads. Ksplice is also integrated with OS Management Hub, enabling you to apply and schedule Ksplice security and other updates from the service console.

In addition to security and bug fixes, take advantage of enhancement updates that introduce new features, improve functionality, or enhance performance.

OS Management Hub enables you to:

  • Perform OS update management across distributed systems including Oracle Linux and Windows Server instances in OCI, and Oracle Linux instances on-premises, and on supported third-party cloud providers.
  • Easily search for, install, and remove packages and updates.
  • View inventory of installed and available packages and updates.
  • Use OS Management Hub's integration with Oracle Ksplice to provide more management control with zero-downtime Oracle Linux kernel and user space (glibc and OpenSSL) updates.
  • Schedule and apply updates across managed instances across your development, test, and production lifecycle stages.
  • Customize update jobs to run immediately, in the future, or on a recurring schedule.
  • View reports on available security and bug updates, and run update jobs directly from the console.

Establish a Maintenance Schedule

DevOps Architect, Application Architect, Cloud Operations Manager

It's important to have predefined schedules to apply this maintenance, and you can ultimately decide to do this in a few ways.

Some key decisions include:

  • Will you patch virtual servers in place, or will you destroy and recreate from scratch?
  • What frequency do you need to patch your servers?
  • How quickly can you apply a patch across your landscape if an urgent need arises?
  • Will you patch production and non-production at separate intervals? If so, how much time will separate them?

Automate and Manage OS Updates

DevOps Architect, Security Architect, Cloud Operations Manager

In OCI, you can manage operating systems using the OS Management Hub service. OS Management Hub allows you to manage updates and patches for your Oracle Linux and Windows Server instances in OCI, and Oracle Linux systems in OCI, on-premises, and on supported third-party clouds.

OS Management Hub helps your systems stay compliant and reliable, while reducing your administration workload. It helps reduce management complexity and human error and allows you to achieve greater operational efficiency and scalability with fleet management capabilities. OS Management Hub allows you to easily automate your patch updates and schedules with customizable configuration options and an intuitive interface. OS Management Hub simplifies and automates Oracle Linux patch management by enabling you to promote updates across development, test, and production lifecycle environments.

OS Management Hub is an integrated service within the OCI Console. In addition to the console interface, a CLI and an API with software developer kits are available to allow you to customize the service to your organization's needs. The service provides a dashboard that identifies available security, bug, and enhancement updates for your Oracle Linux instances.

Flexible patching options enable you to manually apply, or schedule automatic updates. Scheduling automatic updates helps you stay up-to-date and compliant with security and patching policies without human intervention, which saves you time and costs.

Alternatively, you can use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Fleet Application Management to create fleets by defining criteria to group resources such as compute instances, databases, applications, environment types, or other relevant criteria. You define the criteria during fleet creation. When you create a fleet, OCI Fleet Application Management attaches relevant tagging information to the resources within fleets. The tagging information helps you draw inferences about cost tracking, budgeting, logging, and auditing. Tagging information also enables you to organize and search resources.

OCI Fleet Application Management enables you to define and patch third-party, or Oracle products.

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