Kaseya VSA: Software Management – Creating Deployment Profiles

ProVal Tech’s Consultant Dan shares with you how to create deployment profiles for software management in your Kaseya VSA. Dan shows you how to create a deployment profile, name it, configure it, how to reboot it, schedule your deployment and much more.

Step by Step:

1. In celebration of the official release of software management 2.0 I’d like to show you all how to create some basic profiles. In this video, we’ll be exploring creating a basic deployment profile for software management let’s get into it.
2. A software management deployment profile works with the scan and analysis profile scan results that we created in the previous video to deploy the patches to the endpoint. The process of creating an employment profile is very similar to that of a scan and analysis profile.
3. Let’s create a new deployment profile now every endpoint that you target with a deployment profile must also have an assigned scan and analysis profile or the machine will not patch.
4. Let’s create a new deployment profile to do so we need to navigate to software management, profiles, deployment, and click new at the top left.
5. Now just like we did before we start with a good name for our profile. Since we’re going to pair this deployment profile with the domain controller scan analysis profile that we created in the last video together. Let’s name this domain controller deployment profile.
6. Next, we can set our reboot options – these options allow us to fine-tune when the machine can reboot after a patch is applied. You’ll want to make a judgment call on this depending on what type of machines you are targeting, client specifications, and other reasons that you need to reboot.
7. Since I’m configuring this for our domain controllers let’s set this to warn any logged in users providing them with five minutes to save and close before the automatic reboot occurs and if no one is logged in force an immediate reboot on the endpoint, again you can configure these however you need for the environment.
8. Next just like with our scan analysis profile we can schedule procedures to occur on the endpoint here. Though we can choose to fire a procedure off before or after both the update or the reboot.
9. The schedule window here is identical to that of our scan and analysis profile but we’ll want to set it up a bit differently. Be sure to discuss the deployment schedule with your client to determine what best works for them in their environment.
10. Consider the reboot actions that you’re setting as well when configuring your schedule. In our case I’m going to schedule these updates to occur once weekly on Sunday at 10 p.m.
11. Since we’re only affecting a few end points we can leave this distribution window here to one hour, also the same as before is our execution options this time since I’m only scheduling deployment for once per week I do want the machine to patch, if it happens to be offline during its deployment scheduled window we’ll leave skip if offline unchecked here so that patches deploy as soon as it comes back online.
12. We’ll also send a wake on LAN packet to the machine when it’s time to patch just to see if we can’t prevent that missed window altogether.
13. Now you’ll notice this last option here blackout window is something we didn’t see in the last profile we created. This is an easy way to provide exceptions to the above schedule in case you have critical times that you don’t want your machines to patch. This is especially useful if skip if offline is not checked.
14. I really don’t want our domain controller to be patching when I come in on Monday morning so I’m going to set a blackout window to prevent patching during our business hours. Simply fill in the start day, start time, end day, and end time here in this row you can also select every day instead of a specific weekday if you want.
15. Now some of our sharper viewers will notice that this configuration did not allow us to blackout daily business hours but allow patching in the morning or evening and on weekends and you’d be correct. In this case, we want to create one row for each day that you want to blackout hours for. For now, we’ll just leave this to Monday, so I’m going to just enter Monday at 8 a.m. and Monday at 6 p.m. and now we’re set to blackout the day of Monday during our business hours and we’ll just repeat this for each blackout window you want to set for each day.
16. Then we just save, it we say yes, and we do also want to mention that like our scan analysis profiles we want to schedule this via policy in most cases but again you can configure specific endpoints and assign them to this profile if needed.
17. That’s the basics of creating a software management deployment profile.