Best non-SCCM service/app for automating/managing Windows Server updates?

[LRSFC_DanJ]

Are there any good products or cloud services out there that allow easy automation, management and scheduling of on-premise Windows Server updates?

 

For various reasons we don’t have our SCCM linked up to WSUS, so we can’t manage it through that.

 

We want to be able to:

 

• Define groups of servers with orders in which they should be updated
  
• Define maintenance windows and assign specific servers or server groups to them
  
• Define rules such as both domain controllers can’t be down at the same time
  
• Define custom actions that need to be taken before certain servers can be updated, for example Azure AD Connect needs to be flipped to staging on the live server and live on the staging server in order for the live server to get updated
  
• Have monitoring such that we get alerts if a server does not come back up after being updated
  
• Automatic creation of checkpoints before our Hyper-V virtual machines are updated
  
• Automatically migrate virtual machines to other Hyper-V hosts so the host can be updated (we don’t have a high availability cluster, but we do have VMM)
  

 

We’re aware that it’s possible to script this sort of thing, for example using PowerShell with the PSWindowsUpdate module, but we’d rather get something formally supported than trying to roll our own.

 

Does anyone have any recommendations?

[Steve21]

What are the various reasons you’re not using SCCM to patch the servers? Sounds like you want SCCM

 

Bearing in mind clients can be managed seperate to servers even if the servers use SCCM it sounds like you’re reinventing the wheel a bit

 

Steve

[LRSFC_DanJ]

What are the various reasons you’re not using SCCM to patch the servers?

 

 

• Our SCCM project ran out of time/funding before WSUS could be implemented within SCCM
  
• We understand that to use WSUS within SCCM it has to be on the same server, which won't work for us due to storage reasons
  
• We don't currently have the necessary licenses to use SCCM with servers, as these are not included in Microsoft 365 A3 (but client management is)
  

 

Long term yes I agree it would be great to have everything in one place on SCCM, however in the intervening time we were hoping there would be some third party product we could get, just to tide us over until we can arrange to have SCCM sorted out.