Possible to 'daisychain' scheduled tasks?

It is not currently possible to daisy-chain or sequence tasks with Patch Manager, but I'm pretty certain that it's on the Feature Request list for some future release.

However, it may be possible to achieve what you need to do by using the Automation Role's ability to throttle worker processes and threads per process. By throttling the threads per process, you can effectively limit the number of clients that can be patched simultaneously. By default, a worker process runs with a thread pool of 16, which can allow 12-15 clients to patch simultaneously. If you were to reduce that to 8 threads, you could effectively limit the number of machines simultaneously patching to around a half-dozen per worker process.

For that matter, recognizing that Patch Manager actually only patches about a dozen at a time in the default configuration (per AutoServer/per WP), you may find that the default configuration is already sufficient to meet the business requirements that are limiting the number of machines you can simultaneously patch. Of course, if you have multiple AutoServers, as might be the case with geographically distributed environments, they can patch in parallel, so maybe not.

The total number of client connections is also related to the number of worker processes that is available on the Automation Server. By default, there are two worker processes available, and multiple tasks can span across the thread pools of those worker processes. With 16 threads and 2 processes, that puts us up around two dozen simultaneous (maybe a bit more, depending on threads used for task overhead) client connections. So, ultimately you have two configuration values you can use to manage the number of simultaneous client sessions -- threads, and worker processes. An AutoServer with MAX=1 worker process and 8 threads won't ever talk to more than 8 clients at a time.

For more information on these settings, see Appendix B of the Patch Manager Administrator Guide.

There's a typo in that link. It should be http://www.solarwinds.com/documentation/patchman/docs/PatchManagerAdministratorGuide.pdf

Thanks Andrew. I fixed it.

This "BatchPatch" product appears to have that daisy-chain feature you're looking for : Advanced Multi-Row Queue Sequence | BatchPatch - The Ultimate Windows Update Tool .