Google Cloud VM Manager

VM Manager in Google Cloud helps to manage the large scale Virtual machine fleets and removes the operational burden. It helps customers to achieve the patching and compliance of Virtual Machines and protect the VM’s from vulnerabilities.The major areas where VM manager can help include

Patch Management

Configuration Management

Inventory Management

This specific POC only talks about Patch Management

As usual in GCP, we have to enable the VM manager API for the specific project where your VM resides.

Activate the OS config agent for the project, it charges for more than 100 VM’s.

Compute Engine Metadata should get automatically configured by this time, just need to cross check the configuration

Now go to OS Patch management and create a Patch deployment. Just an overview before doing this I have created 2 Windows server 2012 Datacenter editions(Virtual Machines) and marked them with a Label “environment:development”

Select all the zones and filter the VM’s by the labels we provided while VM creation( in our case it is “environment:development”

Give a deployment name( I gave “development”) for identification and select the required windows updates based on your requirement( I selected all)

The schedule which we are creating is for automating the patching for these development environments , so we configured the recurring option with the required Date & Month

Click on Deploy, it creates the Deployment and can see it here.It will run on the schedule time

We can see at the scheduled time the job successfully completed and can see our Windows machines are up to date from the Dashbaord