Cluster Aware Updating and WSUS 4.0

Recently at TechED Australia I gave a session on Cluster Aware Updating and the new features of WSUS in Windows Server 2012. You can see the whole presentation here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Australia/2012/WSV332 Cluster Aware Updating (CAU) is a fantastic technology that works with existing patch management solutions. It works with Windows Server 2012 failover clusters. What happens is that CAU detects that an update is required, obtains the update, puts the first node into maintenance mode and transfers workload to another node, applies the update, restarts the node if necessary, and then brings any transferred workload back to the original node prior to moving on to updating other nodes in the cluster. As you’ll see in the demo towards the end of the presentation, the process is quite seamless. You can configure CUA to occur automatically, or you can trigger a manual update of all nodes in the cluster. This update method takes a lot of the pain away from cluster updates compared to traditional methods of updating clusters. The first part of the talk linked above deals with WSUS 4.0. I show how to deploy WSUS to a computer running Server Core and also demonstrate some of the new WSUS PowerShell functionality.