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Do u keep the OS updated on your SQL servers?

What do you do to keep the win2K OS updated on your SQL servers? Have a situation where the win2k server service packs and hotfixes on most of our corporate SQL servers have not been kept up to date due to some turnover in our infrastructure group. Now this group has stated they no longer maintain the OS of the corporate servers, which is news to me and leaves me the part time DBA to upgrade them myself since no one else will do it. Most have Win2k SP3, some SP2. This issue came up when I asked about applying the MS04-11 update. Most of these SQL servers do not have a seperate test environment available and are running SQL2k ver 8.00.818. For these I plan on having full tape backup and making a server image using GHOST. Then upgrading to Win2kSP4, then apply all the 15 critical updates, then the 8 recommended updates older then one week. My reasoning is if I am going to take the server down I might as well make it up to date. The recovery model is to uninstall all the updates that were applied to get the server back to pre-upgrade status. If that fails then use the ghost image, and if that fails the tape backups. I will bring in the main user to verify the success of the upgrade and that thier specific app is working. Would you modify this or add any other steps that are needed? Thanks.
Looks good to me…. Gaurav
Moderator
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Me too, after that I schedulle to updates automatically in non working times and I have no problem at all, just a thougth
Luis Martin
Moderator
SQL-Server-Performance.com
I agree with these guys. These machines are at a pretty high security and performance risk with the sp and critical update levels they are at. Just as an fyi, we set our environment up this way. Non-severity critical updates:
Once a month:
Dev – First Thursday of each month.
Prod – Second Thursday of each month. Critical Updates:
Evaluate risk. If not applicable to SQL Server or too risky, move to regular schedule.
If applicable, apply during nightly maintenance window from 11:00pm – midnight. This gives us a chance to view the forums and such to see if there are any issues with the patches. MeanOldDBA
[email protected] When life gives you a lemon, fire the DBA.
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