On your site of hundreds or thousands of hosts have you had to patch agents immediately as they get deployed?  For this reason I’ve always been a big fan of cloning an agent that has the required plug-ins and all the recommended core agent and plug-in patches, then using that clone for all new agent deployments. With EM 12c this got even easier as you can now clone the agent using the console “Add Host” method. You still have to rely on the EM users to use the clone.The one problem I have with cloning is that you have to have a reference target for each platform that you support. If you have a consolidated environment and only have Linux x64, this may not be a problem. If you are managing a typical data center with a mixture of platforms, it can become quite the maintenance nightmare just to maintain your golden images.You must update golden image agents whenever you get a new patch (generic or platform specific) for the agent or plug-in, and recreate the clone for each platform. Typically, I find people create a clone for their most common platforms, and forget about the rest. That means, maybe 80% of their agents meet their standard patch requirements and plug-ins upon deployment, but the other 20% have to be patched post-deploy, or worse – never get patched!

While deployed agents and plug-ins can be patched easily using EM Patches & Updates, but what about the agents still getting deployed or upgraded? Wouldn’t it be nice if they got patched as part of the deployment or upgrade? This article will show you two new features in EM 12.1.0.3 (12cR3) that will help you deploy the most current agent and plug-in versions. Whether you have 100s or 1000s of agents to manage, reducing maintenance and keeping the agents up to date is an important task, and being able to deploy or upgrade to a fully patched agent will save you a lot of time and effort.

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