WSUS Installation Prerequsites

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Describes what you need to have in place in order to install and deploy, WUS. For an overview of the installation process see WSUS Installation Overview.

Index

Server Hardware Requirements
Server Software Requriements
Server Disk Space Requirements
Client Software Requiremets

Server Hardware Requirements

WSUS requires a single server for basic operation, although you can scale your WSUS implementation to larger numbers of servers if you wish. For a basic implementation of up to 500 users, hardware requirements, per Microsoft, are:

1GHz CPU
1GB RAM

You also need a network card, and around free disk space (described below)

Server Software Requirements

You need the following software components:

A supported Windows Server operating system - Windows Server 2003 is the preferred OS, but Windows 2000 is also supported. WSUS is supported on all editions of Windows Server 2003, but there are some restrictions of you use the Web Edition (See [WUS Restritions With2k3 Web].
IIS - WUS is operated via IIS, so your WUS Server needs to have IIS loaded. You need at least IIS 5.0.
.NET Framework 1.1 SP1 - get this 7.982MB download from the Microsoft download site. The .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 is delivered as a hot fix installation file (see KB article KB867460 for details). This expands to 55.6 MB (58,335,654 bytes) on disk prior to installation. The installation of this hot fix alsos stop IIS, and requires a reboot.
Background Intelligent Transfer Service 2.0 (BITS 2.0 English.zip) - this is a new version of BITS, at present only available to beta testers, or those on the OEP. This is a 1.34MB download.
WSUS Setup (WSUSSetup.exe) - Like BITS V2, this is available only to beta testers or members of the OEP at present. This is download is over 100mb.
SQL Database server. For Windows Server 2003 MSDE is installed during setup. For Windows 2000 it is not and MSDE or SQL server must be installed prior WUS setup.

Client Software Requirements

There are no special requiremetns for WUS Clients. Supported clients include Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server (inlcuding the R2 server,currently in beta).

Server Disk Space Requirements

WUS Server disk space requirements fall into three categories: the WUS service, WUS updates and the WUS data base.

Microsoft recommend that you have at leaast 6GB free disk space to store WUS content. At present, typical usage is around 1-2GB/language, although this does depend on what updates you specify and is likely to grow over time. Typical storage with multiple Operating systems can be as large as 60 or 70Gb

The WSUS service installs (by default) into C:\Program Files\Update Services\. This folder takes up 365MB (371MB on disk) after the initial installation.

The WSUS Database is managed by MDSE, and is installed by default into C:\WSUS\MSSQL$WSUS. This folder takes up 216 MB after the initial install, synchronise and with only 2 clients. The size of the DB grows as you add more computers, and as you manage more updates.

Application compatibility test

The list of applications that Microsoft officially tested WUS with will be listed in the WSUS Deployment Guide.

Application Compatibility List contains the list of applications that can coexists side by side of WUS on the same server.

Last Modified 4/2/10 1:54 PM