danblee.com

Tutorials & Knowledge Base Articles for System Administrators who wear many, many hats.

WSUS – Remove Unneeded Updates

by 1 Comment

A Brief History

WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) has come a long way. Before WSUS there was SUS, which was a barebones version of WSUS today. Rather than downloading updates from the internet, a SUS Server was put in place within the network. SUS downloaded updates from Microsoft and servers downloaded from the SUS Server. This eliminated the need for servers to reach out to the Microsoft independently and allowed administrators the chance to regulate what was and wasn’t deployed to the servers from a broader perspective. Updates were no longer a full time job and busy administrators were no longer spending their weekends logging into each and every server pushing updates and rebooting.

Now, WSUS has the same initiative as SUS: Download updates and push internally. But instead of only being able to do updates, WSUS can do other updates such as features packs and device drivers. Many of the scripts that our more savvy peers wrote over the years for SUS were turned into tools, wizards, and features in WSUS. WSUS gives us plenty of management options while reducing interference with the production of our servers.

Removing Unneeded Updates

With proper rules in place, WSUS can be configured to download only what your servers need. WSUS is intelligent enough to understand when older updates become obsolete. These updates are unneeded, but will remain on the server until you specifically remove them. You’ll want to remove these updates from the WSUS Server if you’re trying to save disk space. Here’s how:

  1. Open the WSUS Manager
  2. Open the “Options” Menu using the tree of the left of the WSUS Manager Console
  3. Choose Server Cleanup Wizard
  4. Select what you want to clean up. This could be anything from computers that aren’t communicating to the updates that are not needed
  5. Run the wizard and finish when complete

WSUS Cleanup Wizard

 

WSUS Hangs While “Deleting unused updates…”

When you first use the Cleanup Wizard, you may run into an issue where the cleanup hangs. Odds are this is because you selected to clean up both the unused updates and the unneeded updates. Try and do one at a time instead of both during the same job. This seemed to work.

Let me know how it goes.

Cheers!