WSUS and Vista Ultimate
Windows Software Update Services v3 has been released.
What is WSUS?
Microsoft® Windows Server® Update Services 3.0 (WSUS 3.0) enables information technology administrators to deploy the latest Microsoft product updates to computers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Windows® XP with Service Pack 2, and Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4 operating systems. By using WSUS, administrators can fully manage the distribution of updates that are released through Microsoft Update to computers in their network.
Basically WSUS, once installed on your server, connects to Microsoft Update website and downloads updates for the products it supports. In addition, a WSUS server can be the update source for other WSUS servers within the organization.
This is smart management. Instead of all the users on your network navigating to Windows Update and downloading the updates separately, just download them once, and distribute using WSUS.
What is missing here? Windows Vista. Yeah, Windows Vista Ultimate updates cannot be pushed through WSUS, as yet. That is if you are using WSUS 2.5. Erik on Windows Vista Ultimate Blog, explains this:
We’re a small team, and Ultimate was designed more as a consumer-focused edition of Windows Vista. We cut support for WSUS at launch to reduce the test burden, and because we didn’t think many WSUS environments would deploy Ultimate. We’re hearing that we were wrong, so all the Wave Zero Extras will be offered to WSUS later this year.
So there you go. Not many organisations would have installed Windows Vista, let alone Windows Vista Ultimate, so it kind of makes sense for the Windows Vista Ultimate team to work through this at a steady pace.
Interestingly Virtual Server is the newest addition to the product family in WSUS. As per Microsoft Update Team Blog
“Virtual Server” will be added in the next one or two days. This new product family allows updates to be offered to Virtual Server components. Different categories offered under “Virtual Server†may have a different range of supported platforms. Security updates can be released through this category periodically. Due to the variety of applications/components that can reside under this product family, subscribing to this product family is recommended.
That’s some news. So do you create Virtual Environments? Do you use Virtual PC or do you use VMWare? Did you know that Virtual Server is a free product?
So if you are interested in downloading WSUS and the works, head there now…
