Category: Installation and Configuration

I’ve heard some confusion, especially from people who are just starting to implement Configuration Manager in their environment, over the SUP role and how it looks in practice.

Obviously, you’re under no obligation to use the WSUS integration or Software Updates functionality in SCCM. You can continue to use your standalone WSUS, but in the eyes of a user, I’d much rather find my Windows Updates in the same place and being deployed with the same constraints as other applications and packages being released for my machine.

When you add the WSUS role to your target server, you’ll want  to complete only the initial configuration window where you’re asked where to store the updates content. Don’t proceed with the next bit, which will have you choose classifications and such. All of this is to be done within the console. The last time I did a rebuild, with v1607, I found that I had to perform a manual synchronization with Microsoft Update once after adding the role.

Once that’s done, you can add the Software Update Point role to your site server in the console. In my last corporate environment, this process was repeated for the CAS and three primary sites. The primary sites were configured to synchronize with the CAS, so essentially, CAS communicated with Microsoft Update and notified downstream/child servers when it retrieved new items. The idea here is that your WSUS database is complete, and then you can narrow down product selection and update classification from the SCCM console.  This is done during the addition of the Software Update Point role.

It’s a good idea to enable the WSUS cleanup tasks (I have had to deal with the results of not doing this), as well as enable alerts on synchronization failures so that you can be sure that the SUP is successful in what should be a mostly-automated process when you’re done, with the help of automatic deployment rules.

You should get an understanding for the entire process from CAS Microsoft sync to client experience before you implement this in production. You’ll want to lay down your intended Sync schedules, Software Update Groups, ADRs, target collections, available/deadline preferences, and probably create staggered deployments to allow a “beta” group to receive updates prior to being dropped into full production.