Does PM take over WSUS

koloradoken

I have a somewhat unique deployment request. Current WSUS environment spans 5 sites and services thousands of clients. We have a 250 client license for PM. If I install the full PM utility, will I be able to not only leverage the 250 seats of PM but also continue to provide WSUS services to the remaining non Solarwinds licensed machines directly through the existing WSUS deployment?

jrouviere

I believe the short answer is, Yes.

Patch Manager licensing is inventory based and will also be consumed by nodes you manage from Patch Manager.

So for example, you could use Patch Manager to publish updates to WSUS and then let WSUS handle the patching via Group Policy (assuming you don't have additional tooling in place) and as long as Patch Manager doesn't inventory those machines or try to push patches to them directly it shouldn't consume a license.

That would leave you to either manage only Servers or Tier 1 (or however you want to refer to your top priority/high touch types of machines) nodes with Patch Manager and the other nodes could still be dependent on WSUS, but with the addition of 3rd party updates (just no reporting on individual nodes in Patch Manager and no node management from Patch Manager).