WSUS Cleanup without overloading your WSUS server.

As you may know, WSUS Cleanup Wizard, can take a long time to run and resource consume. Here you a have a comprehensive method, in order to avoid this "hungs".

WARNING: In a WSUS hierarchy, it is strongly recommended that you run the cleanup process on the lower-most, downstream/replica WSUS server first, and then move up the hierarchy. The upstream server should be the last one on which the cleanup is run.

Decline all superseded updates.

a.       Go to the WSUS console-> Updates -> All updates. Select “Approval: Any Except Declined”, and “Status: Any”

 

b.      Enable the Superseded column, and order the list to see all Superseeded

c.       Then Select and with right-click, chose “Decline” for all superseded updates.

d.      Activate the automatic approval/decline in order to prevent to generate more superseded updates:

- Go to: “Options” on the left menu.

- Select Automatic Approvals.

- Go to Advanced and check all the boxes

Proceed with the WSUS Server cleanup wizard.

e.      Go to “Options” again.

f.        Click on “Server Cleanup Wizard”

g.       At this point there is 5 options checked. But in order to not overload the server we are going to do them in the next order

 

A.      ONLY select “Computers not contacting the server” option and continue. This will remove old computer accounts from WSUS that didn´t contacted in more than 30 Days, for example computers that they don´t exist anymore on the Domain. (NOTE: This step is NOT mandatory, sometimes there are computers that they are still in use, but they are off due to user leave, incident, etc… and some of our customers prefer not to do it)

 

B.      Open the “Server Cleanup Wizard” and ONLY select “Expired Updates” AND “Superseded Updates”. Continue until it finish the process.

 

C.      Open again “Server Cleanup Wizard” and select ONLY “Unused updates and update versions”. Continue the process until it finishes.

 

D.      Open again “Server Cleanup Wizard” and select “Unneeded update files��. Continue the process until it finishes.

 

 

Repeat the process for Server Cleanup Wizard.

 

After you completed the previous steps, is recommended to repeat again the process, as some files are going to be still in use the first time. This way we ensure that the CleanUp was successfully made.

 

 

Monitoring period

 

                After performing all the steps before, we would need to wait 24h to let WSUS arrange the content and synchronize successfully.