[German]One more quick piece of information for administrators who manage Windows Server 2022 Datacenter virtual machines on Microsoft Azure with Desktop Experience. Microsoft has just announced that hotpatching is now available for these machines.
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I came across the Techcommunity post Hotpatching is now available for Windows Server VMs on Azure with Desktop Experience! via the following tweet announcing the new feature.
This all relates to Azure Edition VMs with Desktop Experience, where customers have been asking for hot patching for some time. Now hot patching beyond Server Core is available for Windows Server 2022 Datacenter. This affects all versions of Windows Server 2022 Datacenter (on Azure and Azure Stack HCI). However, this approach requires new image files that Microsoft has released. Existing installations do not support this feature.
Advantages of hotpatching
Hotpatch updates make it easier to secure Windows Server VM instances with updates without having to reboot. Microsoft writes that customers who have already been able to test this feature report that they can update their VMs in a matter of days, whereas it used to take weeks. Microsoft gives the following key points for hot patching.
- Fewer reboots, meaning higher availability and therefore fewer workload interruptions.
- Faster deployment of updates because hotpatch updates contain only security fixes, so they are about 10 times smaller, install faster, and take effect without rebooting.
- Minimal OS changes help you with change control.
- Azure Update Manager provides easy management of update patch orchestration.
As mentioned earlier, this feature only applies to new VMs that are set up with the image in question. Existing VMs do not have this functionality and will not get it.
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The required images can be retrieved from a Microsoft page (Azure Portal, is linked in the tech community post) after a user login.
Hotpatching is limited to security fixes released for Windows operating systems (except .NET Framework). Non-security fixes and other third-party updates are not part of the hotpatch program. For more information about the hotpatch schedule and base patches, see the hotpatch documentation.
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