Change And Configuration Management; Compliance Management; Upgrade And Provision; Process Automation - HP BL685c - ProLiant - 4 GB RAM Introduction Manual

Change and configuration management

Without automation, IT activities such as application and patch installation can consume countless
hours of your administrator's time. Beginning with initial provisioning, Server Automation supports
operating system and application provisioning, as individual tasks or as one sequence. Policies
created to manage best practices for operating system and software configurations can be defined by
subject matter experts. These policies can be shared and utilized by administrators in any location,
ensuring compliance with corporate standards across all servers in all data centers.
Server Automation offers powerful capabilities that aid in managing change and configurations. A
secure communication channel enables your IT staff to access any server under management and
view operating system, patch, running services, and audit trail information. Administrators can
compare current application states with previous points in time to quickly identify changes and
rollback as necessary.

Compliance management

Server Automation leverages user-defined best practices and provides out-of-the-box policies to
proactively manage software configuration settings and to correct or prevent drift. You can audit your
entire IT server infrastructure to validate compliance against audit policies and immediately remediate
any areas that are out of compliance. You can write policies to cover software installation,
application configuration, system configuration, virtualization, network, and storage. In addition, out-
of-the-box reports show whether systems comply with regulatory standards. You can use the HP Live
Network subscription service to acquire the most up-to-date security and regulatory compliance
policies, which you can apply to systems as appropriate. The compliance policies from HP Live
Network are drawn from standards such as Center for Internet Security (CIS), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX),
Payment Card Industry (PCI), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Federal
Information Security Management Act (FISMA). New security vulnerability policies are generated
daily from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Because these policies are configured as HP
Server Automation policies, you can add them easily to systems for quick auditing and remediation.

Upgrade and provision

Server Automation provisions operating systems quickly, consistently, and with minimal manual
intervention. You can enforce, easily update and patch, and refresh consistent and secure server
baselines quickly to meet your corporate standards. For software provisioning, a simple user interface
makes it easy for you to create new software policies that contain code, content, scripts, and
configurations. All policies, for both software and operating system, are stored in folders with
read/write access to foster sharing of policies while maintaining control over who can deploy, edit,
and view policies.
For virtual server environments, Server Automation supports provisioning and control of VMware ESX
server and Sun Solaris 10 containers. All operating system and software policies can be used across
physical and virtual servers.

Process automation

Server Automation, a key component of Data Center Automation Center (Figure 3), provides
capabilities to automate operations and processes across disparate IT teams and systems. Integrating
with HP Operations Orchestration, Server Automation workflows automatically coordinate and
sequence IT processes and its sub-tasks to manage end-to-end operations and to ensure that IT follows
best practices. Also, by seamlessly integrating with other products in the Data Center Automation
suite, Server Automation offers server administrators deep visibility into network, storage, and
business application elements in the data center.
9