Updating Large Number of Sites At my current job we have a large number of Drupal installations(not multisite) and we are facing some issues regarding things like applying security updates (really any kind of update).  Currently we have a mix of D6 and D7 sites, though all new sites are D7....hopefully we can eventually move all to D7.

I was curious what strategies you guys would suggest for approaching mass updates in this environment.  Do you think it would be worth converting our sites to using Aegir for update administration?  Will this come down to manually updating/working through each site?

Thanks,
Ryan
There really isn't any right answer to this question. I do something similar to what tenken suggests; see:

https://github.com/greg-1-anderson/utiliscripts/blob/master/drupal-backup-all

The basic idea is, every time I back up a site, I also make a second local copy, and run pm-updatecode on it.  The backup and update sites are live (but accessible only on the internal network), so it's possible to look at either and see if they are running or not.

My experience in doing this is that the task of copying a site and running pm-updatecode is not the main bottleneck in upgrading sites promptly and frequently.  The main bottleneck is testing.  You have to set aside time to do this, or you won't be able to confidently deploy your sites.  Upgrades rarely, but sometimes do break your site, so you cannot really automate this last critical step.

One thing that can really help is good automated tests.  Behat and Selenium are really useful here.  See the small project below for a quick start template:

https://github.com/arithmetric/badcamp2014-behat-travisci