8.0 Managing the ZENworks Management Zone

We assume that you either start with a new ZCM zone or that your ZCM zone has not been used to manage Linux devices. If this should not be the case you will need to adjust our suggestions to the structure of your ZCM zone.

When you start to manage your Linux devices in ZCM you will find that there are many different ways to perform an operation using the ZENworks Control Center (ZCC). For instance, to make a bundle a member of a bundle group you can browse to the bundle and modify its relationship to bundle groups. Another way to achieve the same outcome is to browse to the bundle group and modify its members. If you only want to assign a single bundle to a single bundle group you obviously can do it either way. However, if you have to assign a bundle to multiple bundle groups you will find it to be far more efficient to add the bundle to multiple bundle groups rather than modifying each bundle group individually.

Careful planning of your ZENworks Management Zone (ZCM zone) is crucial to build an environment that does provide easy administration of your Linux devices. In this section, we describe the approach that has been used successfully in many of our projects. This includes the recommended folder structures as well as a naming standard for the objects that you need to create to manage your Linux devices.

Building the ZCM portion of the installation framework in principal consists of the following steps:

  • Build the folder structure for server and server group objects

  • Build the folder structure for bundle and bundle group objects

  • Create bundle groups and server groups

  • Assign bundle groups to server groups

  • Assign servers to server groups

  • Assign bundles to bundle groups