SCCM Software Update PART 5 – Best practices

 

T3D successful business man with a laptop and arms upo conclude the SCCM Software Update subject, I will present some SCCM software update best practices to manage Micorosft updates in production environments.

Subscribes to news site about updates and security

It is important to be aware about the last updates (often the second Tuesday of the month) but also the last security issue. Sometime an emergency update is released by Microsoft to fix a vulnerability so it is necessary to patch quickly and to reduce the risk to be attacked. There are many solutions to make a technology watch: RSS (ex: Microsoft bulletin), Twitter (@msftsecresponse: #security #updates) or Microsoft Security Bulletin Notification. A good source for security purpose is the CERT (sorry it is a French link J).

Create standard baselines

All your system should be set on the same way to ease management and find the issue. That means that systems should be based on the same image installation, same Operating System (as much as possible) and application version and so on. Same baseline should be gathered in the same SCCM collection to ease software updates.

Create a pre-production to validate updates

Updates should be tested before the installation on production environment. Make sure to have a pre-production environment reflect the production environment. That means that pre-production environment contains every operating system and applications that you have on production. So when Tuesday patches are released, first update pre-production environment and test that everything is ok for one or two weeks.

Create packages with pre-determined criteria

To ease the management of update packages, create them with pre-determined criteria such as products, languages, classification and release date. This avoids to reconfigure update packages every month.

Create collections for each Operating System version

Organize collections by operating system ease update packages management. In this way make an update package containing every update for the related operating system and apply it to the collection. So every month, update this update package with new updates (view next point).

Reuse update packages when possible

To limit the number of update packages and so ease management, you should reuse deployment packages most of the time. So in a perfect world, you should have one update package per operating system version (including service pack), and one per application (example: SQL Server, System Center DPM etc.).

Create an emergency procedure

Sometime Microsoft releases a security update outside of Tuesday patch process because a 0-day vulnerability has been discovered for example. That happens one or two times per year. A process to make an emergency patching for this case should exist. Usually the emergency update should take a short time such as 10 to 15 days for pre-production and production environment patching.

Enforce a deadline to install updates

I recommend to enforce install updates when the deadline is reached. However I don’t suggest to force servers restart. I recommend that because everyone knows a colleague that will never install updates because he does not give a damn! With enforcing install updates on deadline, this administrator will have to be aware about updates.

About Romain Serre

Romain Serre works in Lyon as a Senior Consultant. He is focused on Microsoft Technology, especially on Hyper-V, System Center, Storage, networking and Cloud OS technology as Microsoft Azure or Azure Stack. He is a MVP and he is certified Microsoft Certified Solution Expert (MCSE Server Infrastructure & Private Cloud), on Hyper-V and on Microsoft Azure (Implementing a Microsoft Azure Solution).

5 comments

  1. Hi ROMAIN SERRE

    suppose we have global clients where they are using different language OS as well as software, so i want to update thees client machines OS as well as software(ms office).
    is WSUS (SCCM with SUP Point) Server download the updates based on client machine (client machine’s OS) in organization, or topically it will download from Microsoft which are available. ?
    In organization having win7, win8, win8.1 and win10 as well as server operation systems.
    if WSUS server not download based on client machines, how we can differentiation with update need to install which client machine. ?

  2. Hi,

    For your needs I think you have to create one software update group including all Windows update regardless lanaguages or OS Version. The OS client will select the required updates regarding its version and its languages.

    There is no reason to make several software update groups for Microsoft tuesday patches. Make one SUG for Server edition and one SUG for workstation edition.

    Hope I have helped you.

    Romain.

  3. Hi Romain,

    Very good blog and detailed information about Software Update Point (SUP) in SCCM 2012.

    Regards,
    Vishal.

  4. Hi Romain

    i have a few ADRs that i have created for Security, Updates and Critical updates. i need to setup config manager to install these updates first to testing (i have a device collection for this) and then maybe after 2 weeks push the updates to production. how can i achieve this?

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