Behavior of Maintenance Window with a future schedule
Article ID: 202683
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
You are trying to implement a couple of maintenance windows on a future schedule. The maintenance windows were configured to start at a later date, but once the maintenance window was enabled, it already enforced and prevented tasks from executing. Your expectation was as it should've only started the enforcement at the date specified.
You have a maintenance window that you want to be enforced/activated (meaning be able to run and do things without restrictions) until a certain date in the future as specified in the "Advanced" option (for example start and end date of Nov 10 2020). They want that the maintenance window is only active/in use/enforced on a specified date (a day or a week).
The agent UI shows that the maintenance window "Next activation" is until 2020-11-10:
But when you run a task against one of those machines that are targeted by this maintenance window, it will not run and display a "Non in maintenance window" warning in the task UI.
If you try to set the start and end dates THEN disabled the policy to see if gets enabled at the specified date, but nothing happened either (Note: That's correct, when policy is disabled it is disabled on the server, so client does not even know anything about it.)
It seems like if a maintenance window is active, anything outside of the specified dates are inactive hours regardless. In your case this is a bit problematic since you would prefer having lockout hours enabled only on the dates they need it and the rest of the time all hours are active.
Environment
ITMS 8.0 and later
Cause
Customer education.
Resolution
Question:
Based on the scenario above, are we taking the approach that as soon as the maintenance window is turned on it is in a closed maintenance window that can't do anything until "Nov 10" when we "open" the schedule to actually allow to execute things on the machine?
Answer:
I'm afraid above is correct, the dates on the "advanced" page simply specify when the windows configured in the policy are active. There has been no changes in this functionality for years. It has always worked this way.
Question:
What could be a recommendation for a customer that wants to setup his maintenance windows in certain way for the future?
Setup double schedule on the same maintenance window? One to be completely open and another schedule for the day/week that they want to have it in certain way?
Or just create the maintenance window the day before and turn it on the desired day?
Answer:
"Advanced" options are applied to the whole policy only, so you will need two policies.
Create one more maintenance windows policy and assign it to the same machines. Set start time to 00:00 and end time to 24:00.
Set the needed start/end dates for both policies.
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