For sometime I wanted to deploy Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) into our network, I remember back in my old job when I was playing around with Websense, which is a terrific application, you would notice a huge amount of bandwidth being used for the same package download, multiple links to Microsoft update once a critical one is released but since we didn’t have active directory, no proxy deployed into our infrastructure, I couldn’t quite figure out how to go about this.

On top of that, talk about virtualization, OK me loving it … I have been playing around with it for a while because I finally decided it is not wise to test on live environment … some people cry when I screw up ;p –talk about that later-

I like VMware, I am currently using version 5, I don’t have the latest for some reason, the only downfall that I know of is not being able to have Vista V-machine, hehehehehe, as if that’s important … OK also, server 2008 edition as well …

Set up my VMware server 2003 edition, configured it as a domain controller. I installed WSUS on it too since it is for testing, also don’t forget to install IIS before extracting WSUS package. Anyway WSUS is not a resource extensive application, all you need is enough space, I am searching for a crappy server to put it on once I go live.

The VMware workstation should be assigned sufficient hard disk space, that was my mistake and I couldn’t just re-configure that.

The OS should take a little over 4GB, WSUS needs at least 6GB to store updates locally and 2GB for SQL Engine, so you do the math and leave a little extra for whatever, so I assigned it 20GB.

After installing IIS, run WSUS which you can download from Microsoft for free, SQL server Desktop Engine will be installed if you don’t have any other DB server you want WSUS to use. It’s pretty much an easy to go through setup. And you want to skip the Mirror part if this is the only WSUS server you have and you don’t want it to mirror data from another WSUS server

I finished installing WSUS and it is managed through the web so no console or anything unless there is such a thing I don’t know about. Anyhow I believe I need to configure my policies so that my clients would know to get their updates from the WSUS server. I need to setup a VMware client to see how to go about this.

Now I am creating a client and fooling around with the web management … to be continued