• Article

How to Integrate Fabric Updates with Configuration Manager

 

Updated: May 13, 2016

Applies To: System Center 2012 SP1 - Virtual Machine Manager, System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager, System Center 2012 - Virtual Machine Manager

Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) supports using a WSUS server that is part of a Configuration Manager environment. This will also enable you to use the reporting capabilities of Configuration Manager to provide compliance information.

If you use an existing WSUS server from a Configuration Manager environment, changes to configuration settings for the WSUS server (for example, update classifications, languages, and proxy settings) should only be made from Configuration Manager. The VMM administrator can view the configuration settings from the VMM console, but cannot make changes.

Note

For VMM, the synchronization schedule is always on-demand, regardless of the setting specified in Configuration Manager.

Before you perform any configuration steps for update management in VMM, you should first configure the Configuration Manager environment.

The following procedure contains an overview of the steps you need to perform in Configuration Manager. For more information, refer to the following Configuration Manager documentation:

To configure Configuration Manager to share a WSUS server with VMM

  1. In Configuration Manager, create a collection. This collection will contain all the computers that VMM will manage.

  2. To the collection, add the computers that VMM will manage. This includes all computers for which VMM will perform update management. This includes computers such as the following:

    • Virtual machine hosts

    • Library servers

    • VMM management server

    • PXE servers

    • The WSUS server

  3. Exclude this collection from any software update deployments delivered by Configuration Manager to ensure that VMM controls update management of those computers.

    Note

    You will still be able to view compliance information for this collection in Configuration Manager reports.

  4. If you want to include VMM compliance information in Configuration Manager reports, create an update group in Configuration Manager that contains all the updates against which you want to measure compliance for the computers managed by VMM.

    Important

    You are creating this update group only to provide reporting capabilities. Do not deploy this update group to the computers managed by VMM.

To configure VMM to use a WSUS server shared with Configuration Manager

  1. Add the WSUS server to VMM by following the steps in How to Add an Update Server to VMM.

  2. After you have added the WSUS server to VMM, open the Fabric workspace, expand Servers, and click Update Server, and then select the update server.

  3. On the Update Server tab, in the Properties group, click Properties.

  4. On the General page, ensure that the Allow Update Server configuration changes check box is not selected, and then click OK.

For more information about configuring update management, see Managing Fabric Updates in VMM.