Decline superseded updates in WSUS

Although you can use the server cleanup wizard, you may want from time to time to clean manually all superseded updates to clean your WSUS infrastructure.

The trick here is to have the column ‘Supersedence’ is visible. Open WSUS console and go to ‘All Updates’. Enable the ‘Supersedence’ column.

Now there are 4 options:

• No icon: update doesn’t supersede another one nor is it superseded by an update
•   Blue square on top: this update supersedes another update, these updates you do not want to clean…!!
•   Blue square in the middle: this update has been superseded by another update, and superseded another update as well, this is an example of an update you may want to clean (decline)
•   Blue square in the right below corner: this update has been superseded by another update, this is an example of an update you may want to clean (decline)

Note: Always verify that all superseding updates are approved before doing this operation!

Move WSUS content to another drive/partition

This is, for WSUS 3.0, a very easy job to do! Actually they have a built-in tool. So if you have installed WSUS and discover your partition is filling up, you can easily move the content to another partition using the ‘wsusutil.exe’ utility. You can find this utility typically in ‘C:\Program Files\Update Services\Tools\’.

Command: wsusutil.exe movecontent %content path% %logfile% –skipcopy

%content path% : The new root for content files. The path must exist.
%logfile% : Path and filename of the log file to create.
-skipcopy : Indicates that only the server configuration should be changed and that the content files should not be copied.

Limit SQL Server maximum memory allocation for WSUS instance

One thing you can discover after installing WSUS with a SQL instance (Express) is that the memory allocated by the SQL instance grows quiete big. To prevent this, adjust after installation the maximum memory allocation for the SQL instance.

There are 2 options to do this:

• command-line (osql)
• SQL Management Studio

Command-lin (osql) method:

• Open cmd
• osql -E -S YOURSERVERNAME\sbsmonitoring [hit enter]
• sp_configure ‘show advanced options’,1 [hit enter]
• reconfigure with override [hit enter]
• go [hit enter]
• sp_configure ‘max server memory’, 256 [hit enter] (based on the information I found, this is OK)
• reconfigure with override [hit enter]
• go [hit enter]

SQL Management Studio method:

• If you haven’t installed it yet, download the SQL Server Management Studio Express from the Microsoft website
• Open SQL Server Management Studio Express
• Connect to \\.\pipe\MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE\sql\query
• Right-click on the database and select ‘Properties’
• Select page ‘Memory’ and change ‘Maximum server memory (in MB)’ to value 256
   
• Click ‘OK’

Restarting the SQL instance afterwards is recommended.