Management of Services Pre-Patching - Patch manager

Hi, I have seen this question asked a couple of times on here but not really seen a definite answer or process that works. What is the best way to set up a process that stops services on a couple of servers before Microsoft patches are pushed down to them? For example in my scenario we have to stop the sql service on one server and numerous services on another server before we can patch and reboot 4 app servers. Is there any schedule that can be setup to do this or is it a matter of using 4 different schedules using the service management tool, stop/starting/patching just for this one patching task?

I tried doing a big powershell script to accomplish this but it is getting so complex that if one part fails it will stop the whole script. Any help would be very much appreciated,

thanks

Lee

Find more posts tagged with

patch

service management

patch management

windows updates

patch manger

Accepted answers

All comments

jrouviere

I was looking into doing this with PackageBootHelper and then I realized that you need to stop services on multiple different machines. This would likely require multiple packages if you were updating the same thing on both machines or it would require multiple tasks.

With the information provided by Kelly from this post:

If you right-click on a machine and go to the Computer Explorer you can stop services from there. Once you've selected the service you would like you can click on Control Service on the top right and set the action. Once you click OK you can set the scope of machines and then finally schedule it for how you would like. As far as Patch Manager functionality that is likely the easiest way you could use Patch Manager to accomplish what you're after. Presumably, you would have to create a task for each machine involved in your patching window that would require services stopped and then started again. Really more like a task per batch of services you were working with if that makes sense.

miller_jam

Thanks for your reply, I was looking into doing the multiple tasks process, the only thing that concerns me is if patch manager fails to stop a service it will carry on to the next patching task regardless. What would be good is if one task can take down the service and if this does not happen just fail the task without patching the other server. Like a dependency.

jrouviere

That makes sense and I agree that functionality would be awesome, but I'm not of a way to do that currently so you may need to post that as a feature request or take it up with Support directly.

If it's any consolation the primary things that I can think of which would cause the service stop task to fail would affect the other tasks as well (network connectivity, permissions, the server is off, etc). Might be something I've overlooked, but if one task would fail generally the others would as well.

shocko

According to the product 'what we are working on' blog they were/are working on the ability to run powershell scripts before an after tasks. That was two years ago mind ...... no further word .....