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We have about 30 (and growing) remote sites, all with about 5-6 windows based pc's at them. The offices at the moment have local 2008 servers, but due to the cost of licences we are looking to get rid of these boxes.

The only thing we are struggling with is what to do about WSUS. Ideally I would like to install it on a windows 7 pc (I dont think the 20 connection limit will be an issue) but it doesn't look like that's going to be an option.

Has anyone any ideas how we can store the updates somewhere without an actual WSUS install, or maybe install WSUS on windows 7 (if that's at all possible?)

Cheers Luke

beakersoft
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    Is there a particular reason you can't just use Microsoft's servers? WSUS isn't very useful over WAN links as it defeats the purpose. – Nathan C Aug 14 '13 at 11:32
  • @NathanC using microsofts servers or wsus doesn't really change a thing, but wsus does give you a lot more control of patching. Also since both wsus and microsofts servers use bits its quite wan friendly. – tony roth Aug 14 '13 at 13:38
  • Also if you want and have w2k8r2 server as your wsus server you can use the distributed branch cache feature. – tony roth Aug 14 '13 at 13:47
  • If you don't need to control exactly which patches are approved, and aren't going to pull reports to ensure patch compliance, I would recommend just using GPO to enforce an update schedule on these remote machines. – Jeremy Lyons Aug 14 '13 at 23:56
  • @Tony- he wants to get rid of the branch servers. – Jeremy Lyons Aug 14 '13 at 23:56
  • @JeremyLyons its distributed branch servers which in this case will use the workstations as part of the cache. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd755969(v=WS.10).aspx – tony roth Aug 15 '13 at 14:32
  • notice that I'd said "distributed branch SERVERS" its not servers its distributed branch cache which uses workstations as the cache. – tony roth Aug 15 '13 at 16:15
  • we want to get rid of the servers (Win2008) from the depots completely, so we dont have to pay a licence cost we dont really have to. The ideal solution would be to have a windows 7 machine that acts as the 'server' the other machines can pull updates from, but it looks like there's no way of archiving this. I think the best solution is a new GPO for the depot where they get the updates over the web. We lose the reporting and approvals, but we might have to live with that – beakersoft Aug 16 '13 at 09:05
  • @beakersoft distributed branche cache turns the workstations into caches it does EXACTLY what you are looking for there are no servers at the remote sites. – tony roth Aug 16 '13 at 15:34
  • You may be able to use MBSA to script a report and email it. I've seen how-to articles around the web. – Jeremy Lyons Aug 16 '13 at 19:39

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