Update options in update management center (preview)

Applies to: ✔️ Windows VMs ✔️ Linux VMs ✔️ On-premises environment ✔️ Azure Arc-enabled servers.

Important

• For a seamless scheduled patching experience, we recommend that for all Azure VMs, you update the patch orchestration to Customer Managed Schedules (Preview). If you fail to update the patch orchestration, you can experience a disruption in business continuity because the schedules will fail to patch the VMs. Learn more.
• For Arc-enabled servers, the updates and maintenance options such as Automatic VM Guest patching in Azure, Windows automatic updates and Hotpatching aren't supported.

This article provides an overview of the various update and maintenance options available by update management center (preview).

Update management center (preview) provides you the flexibility to take an immediate action or schedule an update within a defined maintenance window. It also supports new patching methods such as automatic VM guest patching, Hotpatching and so on.

Update Now/One-time update

Update management center (preview) allows you to secure your machines immediately by installing updates on demand. To perform the on-demand updates, see Check and install one time updates.

Scheduled patching

You can create a schedule on a daily, weekly or hourly cadence as per your requirement, specify the machines that must be updated as part of the schedule, and the updates that you must install. The schedule will then automatically install the updates as per the specifications.

Update management center (preview) uses maintenance control schedule instead of creating its own schedules. Maintenance control enables customers to manage platform updates. For more information, see the Maintenance control documentation. Start using scheduled patching to create and save recurring deployment schedules.

Note

Patch orchestration property for Azure machines should be set to Customer Managed Schedules (Preview) as it is a prerequisite for scheduled patching. For more information, see the list of prerequisites.

Automatic VM Guest patching in Azure

This mode of patching lets the Azure platform automatically download and install all the security and critical updates on your machines every month and apply them on your machines following the availability-first principles. For more information, see automatic VM guest patching.

In Update management center home page, go to Update Settings blade, select Patch orchestration as Azure Managed - Safe Deployment value to enable this VM property.

Windows automatic updates

This mode of patching allows operating system to automatically install updates as soon as they are available. It uses the VM property that is enabled by setting the patch orchestration to OS orchestrated/Automatic by OS.

Hotpatching

Hotpatching allows you to install updates on supported Windows Server Azure Edition virtual machines without requiring a reboot after installation. It reduces the number of reboots required on your mission critical application workloads running on Windows Server. For more information, see Hotpatch for new virtual machines

Hotpatching property is available as a setting in Update management center (preview) which you can enable by using Update settings flow. Refer to detailed instructions here

Next steps

• To view update assessment and deployment logs generated by update management center (preview), see query logs.
• To troubleshoot issues, see the Troubleshoot update management center (preview).