{"id":7231,"date":"2015-03-17T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/heyscriptingguy\/2015\/03\/17\/update-offline-virtual-machine-with-powershell-and-wsus-offline-update-part-1\/"},"modified":"2019-02-18T10:30:15","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T17:30:15","slug":"update-offline-virtual-machine-with-powershell-and-wsus-offline-update-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/update-offline-virtual-machine-with-powershell-and-wsus-offline-update-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Update Offline Virtual Machine with PowerShell and WSUS Offline Update: Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary<\/b>: Honorary Scripting Guy, Sean Kearney introduces a cool tool for updating virtual machines.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Hey, Hey, Scripting Guy! I have some virtual machines that are normally offline. They need to be updated on a regular basis, but these machines have no access to the Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) server. Is there an easy answer to this problem?<\/p>\n

—WT<\/p>\n

\"Hey, Hello WT,<\/p>\n

Honorary Scripting Guy, Sean Kearney, is here to show a little magic with Windows PowerShell and the Windows update system.<\/p>\n

Updating an offline virtual machine really isn’t that difficult. Just power it up, wait for the updates to download from Microsoft or your central updating system, and…<\/p>\n

Oh, wait a minute. That doesn’t cover all scenarios does it? What about virtual machines that never get attached to the production LAN? Or virtual machines that operate in a secure network structure, which is isolated from the Internet and the production update system for security reasons?<\/p>\n

Even if you have access to a centralized update system (such as WSUS), you’ll still have to force a download of the updates.<\/p>\n

Then what if you had the option to inject the updates directly into the virtual machine…maybe a process that didn’t even need network access? Would that not be an interesting option?<\/p>\n

That option is yours to have! There is a free tool that you can download from the Internet called WSUS Offline Update. It’s a great tool that runs off donations from the community. It packages the automatic updates into a folder structure that you can burn to DVD or CD, store on portable USB media, or any other distribution solution your mind can imagine.<\/p>\n

By leveraging this solution and a little Windows PowerShell, we can provide an easy-to-automate solution to inject those updates into offline VHD files.<\/p>\n

First we need to download and configure WSUS Offline Update. This is quite simple to do. Go to the WSUS Offline Update<\/a> website, click the Download<\/b> button, and choose the link in the right pane. You will be downloading a single ZIP file that contains everything you’ll need to implement this easy-to-use solution.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

After it is downloaded, unblock the ZIP archive. I have found that if you don’t unblock ZIP archives it can actually affect the content, especially the MSI files within it.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

Extract that ZIP archive to your folder of choice by right-clicking the file and selecting Extract All<\/b>.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

For our purposes today, I am going to place it at the root of drive C. It will automatically create a folder called WSUSOffline<\/b>.  Click the Extract<\/b> button to complete the process.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

Now that you have extracted WSUS Offline Update, it’s time to configure.  This is actually very easy to do or to change afterwards. Navigate to the C:\\Wsusoffline folder and run the UpdateGenerator.exe<\/b> application.<\/p>\n

We are going to target the following collections of updates:<\/p>\n