Environment
Novell ZENworks 10 Configuration Management with Support Pack 1 - 10.1
Situation
How can Patch Management impact size needs of the content repository directory and what is a good practice to avoid problems?
Resolution
It is not necessary nor desirable to download all patches for all platforms for every language.
You should only cache the patches that you intend to deploy to the devices in the ZCC, otherwise you will waste significant disk space and download-bandwidth.
Patch Management needs sufficient storage availability in the content repository to house all the content for patch bundles that you download. The initial download of just the critical patches in the last 30 days will be around 25GB and if you have more languages than that, each language will be about that much or more. To mirror the entire Akamai Content Delivery Network (CDN) would require 1T or more.
Patch Management content is replicated to all primary servers in the zone. Additionally, in 10.2 a new option can be set to automatically cache Patch Management content to satellites (by default it is disabled).
For more information see https://www.novell.com/documentation/zcm10/zcm10_installation/data/b8belrt.htm
Additional Information
In 10.1x version, Patch Management also writes .pls and .lst files to /opt/novell/zenworks/zpm. These are rather small files and should consume no more than 256 M in this release.