Setting up Automatic Windows Updates using Cluster Aware Updating (CAU)

Applying Windows Updates is always a pain - it seems like there's always another patch to install and reboot that is required.  Add in clusters where you have to manually move the load around to ensure that nothing goes down and it gets far more complex.

Starting in Server 2012 Microsoft significantly simplified life for cluster admins by introducing Cluster Aware Updating (CAU).  This tool will drain all the roles from one node in the cluster, patch it, reboot and check for more patches repeated until there are none left.  It will then repeat this for the other nodes in the cluster.  Even more awesome, you can set this to run automatically allowing your Windows hosts to stay fully patched (with all the bug fixes and security fixes that entails) without affecting your VMs at all.  We'll cover how to get this setup here in this post


Tech TopX: Hyper-V Networking

This was actually one of our first ones released, but I've been slacking.  Check out this video for an overview of networking both with and without SCVMM.  SCVMM is particularly complex so definitely watch this to get an overview!


Make sure to check out my cheatsheet as well for a quick overview of Hyper-V networking!

Tech TopX: Metro Availability

Newest entry in our Tech TopX series: Metro Availability!





Check out the official documentation on Portal for more information!


Hyper-V Playbook

So you just got a Nutanix cluster and want to install Hyper-V?  This guide goes over the steps 
you need to do and how to manage this new cluster.  We also cover some normal operations such as patching.