Patching a server is fundamentally different from patching a workstation, both in terms of the
scope of the patches and the process involved. You can usually take workstations out of commission and rebuild them from a pre-patched image, if it comes to that. With servers, there is usually no such luxury. The amount of downtime you can afford with any server is likely to be minimal, even if you’re dealing with a server that has backup (as, for instance, with an active/passive cluster).
One of the tougher jobs that server administrators have to deal with is figuring out the priority of patches for servers. They not only have to deal with the server, but also with the applications running on it, the middleware between applications and a host of other things. If you have a mess of patches to go into a given server, where do you start, and how do you move forward?
The best thing to do before you load in a single patch is to prioritize, to figure out what goes in first and why. Over time I’ve compiled a patch-ordering map for servers that covers just about everything, and I stick to it as best I can whenever it’s time to bring a new machine up to speed. Also, this way, if something peculiar arises that might be traceable to a given change, it’s a little easier to isolate what it might be. Patching Windows servers
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