Steve Jones - SSC Editor (9/26/2016)
jasona.work (9/26/2016)
I find it a little concerning that while there's been a decent amount of talk about how this will impact desktop Windows, there's not been so much about how it's going to impact server Windows:https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askpfeplat/2016/08/30/a-bit-about-the-windows-servicing-model/[/url]
Other than what boils down to basically "oh, yeah, this change includes Server 2008 R2 / 2012 / 2012 R2, you're just going to get the update rollups too."
I mean, I know they don't generally push out new "features" to the Server OSes (at least not without calling it a new version and charging you for it,) but still. My biggest concern is, the environment I'm in, we get about 3.5 weeks from Patch Tuesday to have all our servers patched to the current updates. If a patch causes problems, we've been able to put in the paperwork to allow us to hold off on the patch until we either resolve what's causing the problem, or MS releases an updated patch that fixes the problem. Now, we'll have to put in for a rather larger number of patches.
Keeping in mind, generally the updates don't cause us problems, but when they do cause a problem, it's usually a BIG problem...
This is disturbing. In my last enterprise, we would apply patches the week of Patch Tuesday to a small number of systems. This was a representative set of systems, but lower in importance if something broke. It rarely did, but it happened a few times. The next week we would do most systems, and the following week was catchup for those systems that were critical, but wanted more time to test things.
Rolling out to all systems isn't really feasible in an Enterprise.
On the flip side, I get MS having issues with separating patches out, and some enterprises never wanting to update anything.
The pattern for our patching is to hit QA first and in my case let the patches "bake in" for a week and usually if there's a problem with a patch, either it came up on tech sites between Patch Tuesday and the day they start offering the patches via SCOM, or it pops up during the patching and I can roll my VMs back on the snapshot and skip that update.
Once QA has been fine for a week or so, then I hit my production servers.
But, even so, this new patch process from MS concerns me, as several times when there's been an issue with an update, it doesn't come to light until a week or two or three after Patch Tuesday...
Not looking forward to this...