My test environment usually has a dozen or so machines at any one time. Some of these are short lived and used for a particular piece of testing ““ others are kept for years. I decided that I wanted to keep up to date on the patching of these virtual machines so installed WSUS on a Windows 2012 box.

One issue is that if a VM isn"™t started for 10 days WSUS starts complaining that it hasn"™t been contacted and if you run the WSUS clean up wizard the non-reporting servers may be removed. Checking the WSUS console for which machines haven"™t sync"™d recently is a chore.

In Windows 2012 both WSUS and Hyper-V come with a PowerShell module. This means I can do this:

`$date

=

(

Get-Date

)

.

AddDays

(

-10

)

Get-WsusComputer

-ToLastSyncTime

$date

|

sort

LastSyncTime

|

select

-First

4

|

foreach

{

$computer

=

(

$_

.

FullDomainName

-split

“.”

)

[

]

Start-VM

-Name

$computer

-ComputerName

Server02

-Passthru

}

`I"™m using the WSUS server as my admin box but if you were accessing a remote WSUS machine change the code to

Get-WsusServer -Name w12sus -PortNumber 8530 | Get-WsusComputer ““ToLastSyncTime $date |

I sorted the computers WSUS knows about by date ““ picked the last 4 to sync so I didn"™t overwhelm the Hyper-V host and started them up. Only trick is to get the computer name out of the FullDomainName property.