How to move WSUS from one server to another

re: How to move WSUS from one server to another

David.Rawling — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:21:40 GMT

Sorry, but this procedure does not seem to work.

I have just attempted this as a migration path from Windows 2003 and WSUS 3.0 SP1 to Windows 2008 and the WSUS role.

Despite the source server being up to date, and the destination server having fewer selected products than the source, the destination server attempted to download 45GB of updates rather than use the existing copies on disk. It's worth noting that in this "backwater" (?) country (Australia!!) 45GB is a reasonable monthly quota for a household with very heavy usage, and a significant chunk of change for many corporates (who are still slugged up to 19c/MB for Internet data traffic) - $5000 for this little effort.

Furthermore, this procedure did not migrate computer groups, approvals, auto-approval rules, email notification settings, or product and update type selections.

A far, far better approach would be to reconfigure the database so it supports detach/attach semantics (even with Windows Internal Database, not just SQL Server) rather than throwing signature errors after attach; or that runs a series of BCP scripts to move the table data, or even simply automatically backs up the database, restores it to the new server, copies the content and executes "wsusutil movecontent -skipcopy" to relocate the content data.

eg:

wsusmigrate oldserver newserver temppath newcontentpath

wsusmigrate oldwsus3 newwsus3 %TEMP% E:\WSUS

re: How to move WSUS from one server to another

Dileep Krishnan — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:52:24 GMT

I tested this in my VMWARE workstation client POC lab and it just works fine... thanks !!!

re: How to move WSUS from one server to another

notanic — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:35:22 GMT

I agree with David.Rawling. This procedure does not work.

Unlike David, I attempted the move between two different instances of Windows 2003, WSUS 3 SP1. Which should be more likely to work.

It only successfully moved the list of patches over, the patches themselves were disconnected. i.e every patch says 'the files for this need to be downloaded'.

From googling around it seems the only way to get a decent backup is just to have more that one WSUS and have them mirror each other.

Restoring a backup of either the content dir or the whole WSUS dir does not work.

The wsusutil.exe import command does make the patch list appear after the restore from backup.