I’m a believer in using WSUS to deploy updates to servers on a scheduled basis. I know from experience that updates don’t get installed on medium to large farms if you rely on manual intervention.
There’s a problem though; if you run something like System Center Operations Manager 2007 to monitor your servers then it’s going to throw a wobbly when servers get updated. The answer is to use maintenance windows by enabling maintenance mode on the servers you are updating. But who is going to put the servers in maintenance mode?
The answer is to run a script that does it for you according to a schedule. Here’s what I’m going to try to do:
- A CSV will detail day, time and server FWQN, i.e. when a monitored server is to be put in maintenance mode.
- A script will run every minute on the SCOM server. It will parse the script and and server that’s due to be but in maintenance mode in the next minute will trigger a command.
- The script will us AgentMM to put the server in maintenance mode.
- This window will coincide with the schedule applied to the server for updating.
If you have a simpler network then this might be a simpler process. For me, I have servers with varying times that are suitable for updates so I have to be very flexible.
I’ll post the script when I have it tested and validated.
EDIT: I’ve added a link to my script.