Friday 11 February 2011

The benefits of a robust patch test method

It's tempting to become lazy with patching. They're now a very regular occurance, they rarely cause an issue and can be installed and forgotten about. But if a patch does cause problems, and you've rolled it out to all users, the results could be an all-user fail.

The February black tuesday updates contained a patch that caused VMware view to fail, VMwares advisory can be found here:

VMware KB: Unable to connect from the View Client on Windows 7 to the View Connection Server after installing the patch in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 2482017 or 2467023

VMWare view is a client that connects users to a virtual desktop infrastructure. Potentially you could have auto approved this update to your network and prevented all users from connecting to their desktops. VMWare were very quick to respond with an update that fixes the problem, but applying View patches to all your machines might not be an easy task compared to rolling out Microsoft Patches.

As virtualisation and cloud computing spreads, the potential for this kind of failure multiplies. Test those patches!