We were deploying patches to our small server estate this weekend and encountered a few issues Id hope someone could clarify or point me in the right direction. As we were patching servers we had secured an 8 hour outage window to perform the work, and as the deployments were manually staggered into batches, we wanted a 100% compliance before we moved onto the next batch of servers.

First of all, what are the Actions that you need to run in order to upload the latest Enforcement Message/States from the managed client to the SCCM server?

For instance after we deployed the software updates to the first collection of devices, we would monitor the status via Monitoring \ Deployments:

Server1:

• Last Status Time = 14:00
• Enforcement State = Pending Restart

I would log onto Server1 and see that it is awaiting a restart, so I manually reboot the server at 14:30. 14:45 I execute the Run Summarisation option and then Refresh the view another 10 minutes later. Last Status Time for Server1 remains at 14:00, I can continue through this process whereby 2 hours later, it still has not updated the status back to the server; even after manually starting Machine Policy Retrieval (I believe this one will run all the other cycles in sequence?).

Because we have a specific window for our work, it would be ideal if we can manually get SCCM to report data back in as real-time of a fashion as possible. Im aware SCCM isnt really designed for this aggressive updating behaviour in fear of overloading the Server and DPs, but in our situation we had a reason to.

Secondly, some of the servers failed installing some of the software updates. When I log onto these servers I can retry the installation via Software Center, so not a major biggie where I need to investigate various logs to see what and why things failed. But what is the Retry behaviour of failed Software Updates, given that we have a maintenance window? Is there a specific, amendable retry interval? This one is fairly important, as we hope to schedule updates for the Server estate in the future, so we dont need to have an engineer monitoring the process through the entire job.

Hi,

Two hour randomized time is by design.

Disable deadline randomization

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg682067.aspx

Hi,

Your systems will check for new updates and compliance on your scheduled interval.  (Determined by your client settings)  If you need to force the behavior, install the SCCM right-click tools.  http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/RIGHT-CLICK-TOOLS-FOR-SCCM-5d8541b5

In addition, please refer to this script:

Initiate Software Updates Scan Cycle using VB script

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Initiate-Software-Updates-6471816e

Hi,

Two hour randomized time is by design.

Disable deadline randomization

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg682067.as

Hi,

Your systems will check for new updates and compliance on your scheduled interval.  (Determined by your client settings)  If you need to force the behavior, install the SCCM right-click tools.  http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/RIGHT-CLICK-TOOLS-FOR-SCCM-5d8541b5

In addition, please refer to this script:

Initiate Software Updates Scan Cycle using VB script

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Initiate-Software-Updates-6471816e

Hi,

Two hour randomized time is by design.

Disable deadline randomization

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg682067.as