macOS 11 Big Sur: Patch workflow and Installation process

Note: The updates of macOS Big Sur are directly supported for customers who have enabled Direct Download in the On-Premise edition of Patch Manager Plus and Endpoint Central and Cloud Roaming agent Customers

macOS Big Sur Updates can be installed only through Mac Software Update as the vendor has not provided offline download link for the same. So the On-Premise edition of Patch Manager Plus and Endpoint Central customers who have not enabled Direct Download should follow the instructions given below:

For customers who have not enabled Direct Download (On-premises & Cloud Distribution Server customers):

For customer who have not enabled Direct download option, macOS Big Sur patches will not be detected under the missing patches until the macOS Big Sur Installer is downloaded. This macOS Big Sur Installer has to be directly downloaded from the MAC App Store. At ManageEngine, we handle this case by enabling "Software Update" found under Internal settings.

• Enable the "Software Update" option on target machines by deploying the Patch 602974 (Enable Mac Big Sur Patches).
• Navigate to Patch Mgmt --> Patches --> Supported Patches --> search for Patch ID 602974 --> install to the respective Mac machines.
• Re-scan the machines after deploying patch 602974 and the missing macOS Big Sur updates will be detected in customer machines.

Note: Deploying the custom patch 602974 to enable the Big Sur updates, is a one time process and need not be done every time a Big Sur update is released by Apple

macOS Big Sur Patch Behavior

Patch installation of macOS Big Sur updates require Internet connection to download the Update file from the client machine's App Store since vendor has not supported Offline download. Hence, We are using the Apple Software Update Feature for installing the macOS Big Sur updates.

The Apple Software Update feature initiates macOs Big Sur update installation through the 'Check for Updates' option under the System settings and the updates are downloaded directly from Mac App store

File Size and Bandwidth Details:

• The download of Mac Os Big Sur Update Installer file currently takes up up to 3GB.
• This patch requires more bandwidth since the agent will download OS updates from the Vendor on every machine.

For further details, refer to this document

Important Note:

The macOS Big Sur updates require Internet connection for deployment and it consumes more bandwidth as the Installer is downloaded directly from the MAC App store.

Disabling Big Sur updates:

To disable Software Update option, deploy the patch 602975 (Disable Mac Big Sur Patches) from the Supported patches tab.

Reach out to patchmanagerplus-support@manageengine.com for any help regarding deploying the updates