We’ve been patching about 400 servers for a number of years that range from domain controllers to exchange, SQL, and everything in between. The TL;DR is “Maintenance Windows are your friend.”
We have about 100 collections that are nothing more than maintenance window collections that servers get put in. I don’t admin all of them so the local admin lets us know what window they want and the server goes into that collection. Nothing is deployed to these collections, they only apply MW’s. We have separate collections where things get advertised to, like Software Updates. Each deployment has its own settings about whether to ignore or respect maintenance windows. Every deployment is always set to be available as soon as possible and deadline as soon as possible if it’s set to respect maintenance windows. Then, at the MW time, it patches and reboots. Our exchange 2010 environment is about 30 servers, CAS’s start patching on Thursday mornings and the mailboxes patch on Sunday mornings, the rest are scattered around between them and their windows don’t overlap. Domain controllers patch one a night over a week. If servers have clusters or some failover requirement we work with the server admin to set up automated processes to occur 10 minutes before the window begins to move resources from node to node to facilitate patching. We do this for failover clusters and FSMO roles on DC’s. If you have services that are resilient, and Microsoft doesn’t break anything with bad patches, patching servers is pretty easy, not much different than clients, to be honest. In fact, if you give clients maintenance windows too it works out great, everybody knows when their computers will reboot, but that’s another discussion. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Duncan McAlynn Sent: Wednesday, January 6, 2016 3:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [mssms] Patching servers with SCCM I have just a little experience in this… ;-) Honestly, I would strongly recommend taking a look at Infront’s OPAS solution that can make this almost a no-brainer. It really does help remove all the pain points you’ve talked about addressing. You can learn more at: http://www.infrontconsulting.com/opas [cid:[email protected]] Duncan McAlynn, Sr. Solutions Specialist, Americas HEAT Software M: +1.512.391.9111 | [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> HEAT Software<http://www.heatsoftware.com/> | 490 N McCarthy Blvd. Suite 100 | Milpitas, CA 95035 Ask me<mailto:[email protected]?subject=Why%20are%20you%20THE%20leader%20in%203rd%20party%20patching%20for%20Microsoft%20System%20Center?> why we’re THE leader in 3rd party patch management for System Center From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Russ Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2016 5:00 PM To: mssms Subject: [mssms] Patching servers with SCCM We've been patching our servers with WSUS up until this point, but we'd like to move over to SCCM. I wanted to get an idea on how people are handling their 2 and 3 tier applications? Currently we have a number of different windows to patch the SQL servers, then app tier, then web tier or whatever. But what I am hoping is to make things a bit more well defined (and to start building collections for various applications and that sort of thing.) Do you suppress reboots on servers, and then send out a script for rebooting? Do you make maintenance schedules which would cause reboots in certain order? Do you patch or reboot manually? What sorts of methodologies do you deploy? It would be nice to put a process and methodology in place so that it's not reinventing the wheel for every individual group of servers. We don't currently have SCCM in place for servers, so that's all new as well. So we sort of have a unique opportunity to start fresh. Would appreciate any feedback or ideas you have give me. Thanks, Russ
