Windows Update behavior in Azure

Microsoft is releasing updates or patches frequently for one or other Microsoft products so as to ensure Microsoft products are up to date with the various enhancements and fixes.

Microsoft also recommends to keep Windows update settings to Install updates automatically so that Microsoft product automatically gets updated whenever there is an update for that product. The only concern here is that, machine gets restarted automatically after updating particular product after 2 days.

During that automatic restart, there might be a possibility that users are connected to that machine and some business application is hosted on that. Here, it may affect the business transactions so most of the time in an organization the automatic update is turned off and machines are patched off business hours so that business is not affected by a reboot of machine.

In Microsoft Azure, whenever we deploy VM’s its Windows update setting is set to Install updates automatically as depicted below:

We can turn off Windows update setting while creating VM’s through PowerShell by using following syntax:

Add-AzureProvisioningConfig –DisableAutomaticUpdates [other parameters]

To know more about creating VM's through PowerShell, you can refer to below mentioned link:

http://squons.blogspot.in/2015/03/creating-vm-through-powershell-part-i.html

http://squons.blogspot.in/2015/03/creating-vm-through-powershell-part-ii.html

After creating the VM, you can verify the Windows update setting as depicted below: