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I have a bunch of Windows Servers and Clients in a VM Lab, and I'd like to simplify Update Management. Currently, I need to run Windows Update on each and every machine, downloading the updates.

I know that with WSUS, I can create a central cache, but it seems that I have to select the updates beforehand. That seems to be a ~250 GB download for Windows 2012 R2, 2016, 10 and 8.1. Also, if I wanted Office, SharePoint or SQL Server, I would have to download them as well.

What I'm really looking for is to basically run Windows Update (incl. Updates for other Microsoft products like Office, SQL Server, etc.) on each machine as-is, but whenever a new package is discovered, cache it. So when other machines need it, they would just grab it from the cache.

That way, if I decide to e.g. install Office 2013 on a machine, I don't want to go back into WSUS, select Office 2013, synchronize. But rather, I just want to run Windows Update on that target machine, see that it needs a bunch of updates for Office 2013, download them, cache them, and then the next machine like that just grabs them from the cache.

Is that possible? Either with WSUS or some other software like that. I don't care about having to approve upgrades, I'm not really looking for Update Management, just for caching.

Michael Stum
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  • Just as ab observation, having looked at this traffic yesterday. Microsoft updates seems to use HTTP range requests of 1MB chunks, so not cacheable by standard HTTP caching means. I could imagine something more specialised though. – Cameron Kerr May 30 '17 at 19:47
  • I know that you can configure WSUS to automatically approve some updates. Are there some updates that you're not able to automatically approve in WSUS? Besides that, the closest thing I can think of is Delivery Optimization (peer-to-peer update sharing) in Win10, but that will never work in downlevel operating systems. – Ryan Ries May 30 '17 at 22:58
  • @RyanRies No issues with approvals, I just want to avoid downloading updates I never need, and potentially missing updates for products that I do need later on. (This is a lab, not a tightly controlled corporate environment) – Michael Stum May 30 '17 at 23:00
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    System Center Essentials 2010 had this very feature back in the day, it's a shame that MS decided to kill the Essentials line, I'd be very interested if you were ever able to find a solution for this. – Noor Khaldi Dec 18 '17 at 19:24

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You can use Squid Cache, they even have instructions for this specific use case here: https://wiki.squid-cache.org/SquidFaq/WindowsUpdate

Swisstone
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