Change Control management for Windows Servers environment.
I’d like to hear from my peers out there: how do you do it?
Let me draw a picture of my environment: 3 Sys Admins for approx 130 production Windows Servers. Needless to say our weeks can be very interesting at times.
Recently we’ve been asked to introduce a Change Control process into our workflow. I don’t have a problem with that. However, our procedure requests that any (I do mean ANY) change to the Operating System, Hardware, or non Business Applications residing on the server be subjected to a Change Control Request.
We’ve discussed this in our team meetings and we’re trying to define when we should put in a Change Control Request and when we don’t need to.
I’m still working on this ‘definition’, so far I’ve got the following:
when deciding if one needs to create a Change Control Request form prior to implementing a change on a server:
1) the server is live and in production
2) the server has been identified as a DR server
3) the possible affect on the business if the implementation fails and the downtime overflows past the maintenance window.
4) has this change been successfully applied before, if not has it been tested on a non production server
5) the change to be implemented is a new piece of soft/hardware, or a full new revision level than the current one
6) the change affects more than ?xyz? people
Some other things to think about before making a change to a server are:
1) it?s past reliability with changes
2) it?s age
3) the number of people using this server might vary during the month
4) look at the big picture, does this server feed information to a more critical server
5) what are your back out options