Upgrading and patching the Tivoli Workload Scheduler agents in your estate is a constant overhead which TWS administrators need to plan for in order to keep their agents compliant and in support, but also to protect the TWS infrastructure as a whole by upgrading older agents to newer releases. Manual upgrades of agents is a time-consuming process which must be performed repeatedly when an end-of-support announcement is made for a particular version, or when a fixpack needs to be rolled out across the enterprise to fix an issue, or to enable newly-added functionality.

The installation of the new code is the easy part, but acquiring root or administrator level credentials to do the install, getting remote access to the target server, transferring and unpacking the TWS software across the network multiple times, and then have someone manually run commands, often out-of-hours, is where the headaches lie.

This presentation and demo shows how using IBM Endpoint Manager to maintain your Tivoli Workload Scheduler agents can reduce an upgrade to a one-click solution while removing manual tasks and automating the process around your business’s requirements.

TWS 8.4 goes out of support on 30 April 2015, with TWS 8.5 and 8.5.1 following on 30 April 2016. IBM Endpoint Manager can significantly reduce the effort required to upgrade TWS 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5.x agents while allowing you to easily patch the Fault Tolerant Agents, Dynamic Agents and z/OS agents in your estate.

IBM Endpoint Manager is available for use free of charge for 30 days. If you would like to discuss the benefits of the solution or to arrange a demo, please drop me a line.

The slides used in the demonstration are available at the link below.

Maintaining-TWS-Agents-with-IEM