.I’ve just read about the Microsoft Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool. The idea is that many organisations keep a certain number of VM’s in an offline state. Maybe they are used once in a while. Maybe they are archived for regulatory reasons. However, there is a chance they need to be powered up once in a while. What is the risk that they power up and are not sufficiently secured by updates? Are you really going to manually power them up every month to deploy updates and human resources?
Microsoft has the Virtual Machine Service Tool accelerator to take care of this for you. It runs a servicing job (using PowerShell scripts) to power up the VM, deploy updates using either WSUS 3.0 or SCCM 2007 and then powers down the VM.
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The product has recently been released by Microsoft. It’s a free download and well worth checking out if you have a limited virtual lab or large production environment that utilises MS virtualisation.
I don’t see any support for Hyper-V yet. Maybe that’s coming – I’ve sent in a question to find out. There’s a dependancy on VMM. VMM 2007 only supports Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 so I guess we’ll have to wait and see on VMM 2008 (RTM Q4 2008).
Its requirements are:
- Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003 R2 (32-Bit x86); Windows Server 2003 R2 x64 editions; Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2.
- Other Requirements: .NET Framework 2.0, .NET Framework 3.0, IIS with ASP .NET installed, Windows Remote Managment, Windows PowerShelll 1.0, Configuration Manager 2007, WSUS3.0, Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (VMM), Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 or higher, Windows Server 2003 R2 SP1 or higher, Active Directory, SQL Server 2005 SP1 or higher, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (VMM only).