WSUS in virtual lab sandboxing, possible?

[sirhideo]

Hi,

I am wondering if it is possible to setup a virtual lab with the application group of AD, WSUS and bunch of WSUS target servers in isolated environment to test Microsoft patches this way. If so, would you please share your experience?

Thanks

[foggy]

You can enable Internet access from within the virtual lab while configuring it, this should enable the scenario you're describing.

[sirhideo]

You can enable Internet access from within the virtual lab while configuring it, this should enable the scenario you're describing.

Not exactly, the patches are downloaded from internal WSUS servers to the member server groups. Since after restart the vms in virtual lab the meta-data will be erased so I am wondering if there is any tricks that I can use for such task.

Background: We do not have enough windows server license to setup a test environment with all application loaded to test the "approved" WSUS patches before pushing it onto production servers..

Thanks

[foggy]

I'm not well-informed on how WSUS works in detail, I was under the impression that having access to Internet from the lab the WSUS server would be able to download the required updates and make them available for the clients in the virtual lab. Though, I can see that metadata can be somehow imported, not sure whether this applies to your scenario though.

[Vitaliy S.]

Since after restart the vms in virtual lab the meta-data will be erased so I am wondering if there is any tricks that I can use for such task

Do you say that after restarting VMs in the virtual lab all changes you've applied to them are erased or do you refer to something else by using word "metadata"?