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Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) gives administrators control over how and when updates are distributed and installed on a private network, allowing organizations to test updates before they are applied in production and reducing the risk of an update causing a service outage. Although it’s possible to rely on Microsoft Update to patch your networked computers, there’s no centralized administration, reporting, or ability to target specific groups of machines, so it’s only suitable for home computers or small businesses with no access to IT support.
In this article, I’ll go over the installation of WSUS 2012 and its prerequisites. Later, in another article, I’ll go further and discuss configuring WSUS 2012. Finally, in part three, I’ll go over WSUS 2012, reporting, and PowerShell.
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Before you begin installing the WSUS role on Windows Server 2012, the server should meet the following prerequisites:
The Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 is installed by default on Windows Server 2012, so unless you have specifically removed it, you don’t need to do anything other than check that it’s installed. The Temporary ASP.NET Files folder is installed as part of Internet Information Services (IIS), which is a requirement for WSUS and is installed as an additional component during the WSUS setup process. Therefore, unless IIS is already installed on your server, you can add the Full Control permission for the NT Authority\Network Service account after WSUS has installed.
In this example, I’m going to install WSUS in a single server topology that gets its updates from Microsoft Update and then distributes them to the rest of the network, and use WSUS with the default Windows Internal Database (WID). WSUS supports the use of other databases, such as Microsoft SQL Express 2008 R2 (or higher) and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (or later), either on the same server as WSUS or on a different domain joined server (but not a domain controller). If you have access to a supported instance of Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft recommends using it instead of WID.
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Now that WSUS is installed and the post-installation tasks completed, we need to do some simple configuration. Make sure that your WSUS server has Internet connectivity so that it can download updates from Microsoft Update before continuing.
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In the next part of this series, I’ll look at how to configure network clients to connect to the WSUS server using Group Policy and testing connectivity to WSUS.
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