Alternate WinSxS store for Feature On Demand and Patching
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I just finished watching the Feature On Demand video discussing an alternate WinSxS source. One of the recommendations, as I understand it, is to copy the WinSxS folder to a network location and share the folder to all servers. My question is, in this scenario, how do you patch the remote WinSxS folder? Even if you copy the WinSxS folder out of the Windows folder on one server and share that before removing it from the Windows folder, as shown in the video, it will not get patched. How does this get done?
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Unfortunately, it will not get patched. Your servers will trigger Windows Update once the role is installed, and apply any updates. In order to update the remote WinSxS folder, you have two options. Try to keep the source folder updated manually (ugh) or periodically replace the source files from an updated server. If you are extracting the WinSxS from an install.wim, you can use DISM to update the install.wim first, then extract out the WinSxS folder.
It might be easier to use an install.wim as your source, instead of a network share. At least there would be less steps to keep it up to date. When installing a role, you would point it to the updated wim file, with a command like thisInstall-WindowsFeature <FeatureName> –Source:wim:z:\install.wim -
Thanks, Mike, for the reply. When you say to use Dism to update the install.wim, do you mean to mount the wim file and copy the WinSxS folder over, or is there a command that I'm not thinking about?
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You're welcome Robert. I wish there was a better solution, it almost makes it not worth it. You need to download the updates, mount the wim file, apply the updates, and commit the changes. Then you could either copy the updated WinSxS folder to your network share, or just point to the wim file itself as the source when needed.
Here is a link that has the detailed steps:
