Greetings SysAdmins. I am looking for a way to automate monthly windows updates for some of my servers. Currently I do them manually during maintenance period. The somewhat unique part I have is that they have to be done in order.
server1: Update, Reboot, back on; then Server2: Update, Reboot, back on; then on and on for 10 servers.
I’m open to ideas, we have (shudder) WSUS but if you’ve experienced the ability to do updates in this scenario in other apps I will explore. Something ideally that can determine that the server has rebooted and move on to the next, or say server1 wait 25 minutes then server2 wait 25 minutes…
Thanks
MECM and rolling reboots? Time how long it takes normally, then use at least 1.5x that time, or as long as you can.
What’s the reason for the ordered reboots? Sounds like you need to review your architecture for better availability.
Exactly this. MECM even has this sort of feature built-in with Orchestration Groups. You can set group 1 to perform updates and reboot at a certain time, then group 2 will only begin its update/reboot cycle when group 1 has completed or crossed a certain threshold.
I use Ansible in my homelab for my Windows server since I already had it setup for some Linux hosts. https://www.ansible.com/for/windows
it’s my understanding that updates cannot be triggered remotely and i’ve spent way too much time trying to figure this out. the closest i’ve come is just launching a powershell window and firing off pswindowsupdate.
definitely curious if you get an answer tho!
