Microsoft Delta Updates - Optional

I do not know about anyone else, but for me I see little benefit of the Windows 10 Delta Updates with respect to our deployments. We seem to have more patching failures when the Deltas are applied. I just assume deploy the CU all the time regardless of the endpoints current patch status.

Similar to the Superseded discussion where I believe there was an option to make those relevant, perhaps having something similar that “disables” the relevance for Deltas would be worth while. My Baselines would be less cluttered and I’m sure my success rates would increases.

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Agreed, I would like to remove deltas from my baselines as well, but the Cumulative update relevance makes the Cumlative not relevant if we are at last month’s rollup level (forcing us to use the Delta instead).

If we can’t make the Deltas not relevant, I’d be happy enough if both of the current month’s updates check for pending restart on the current months’ packages rather than referring to the previous month’s level.

Have you guys been able to confirm that the delta patches as provided by MS are just flaky, or is it something within our fixlet logic causing more failures with deltas? We obviously included relevance changes to eliminate duplicate reporting of deltas & CUs for the same patch, and encourage use of deltas for the bandwidth savings. But if it’s not working because delta patches aren’t very reliable, then I think it would be worth re-considering that.

My [simplistic] view is that the minor savings in the smaller deltas may not be worth all the additional efforts in dealing with them. In my BigFix infrastructure, I can handle the larger files and I would gladly dismiss them for simplicity.

But to answer your question, I don’t have enough data to say if it is BF or M$. I can say that when we have to manually correct failed Deltas, we deploy the CU (via BF or while on the system). They typically work and if they fail, its obvious that it is an endpoint thing.

Now does that mean they run better on their own than in a Baseline? Could be, but we will re-try one time if any component fails in the Baseline; and that helps. So failing a second time, after a reboot, kind of points to a Delta. Not to mention that such a high failure rate are the Deltas.

It would be laborious, but I gather I could manually deploy just the Deltas or just the CUs to some of my failed systems and see which one wins. But that wouldn’t be fun…But I’ll try a small group.

Better would being able to perform a patch cycle with only CU (I keep historical data on the patching results each month) and see if the numbers improve in a noticeable amount.

I’m sure it would be easier and preferred for IBM to just drop the Deltas, but there are customers that want them (probably).

UPDATE: I manually installed the Delta on a few Win10 1803 endpoints where the Delta deployment failed. The manual process failed as well with:
Delta

I then manually installed the CU and that was successful. For the remainders, I deployed the CU via BigFix changing the original relevance to “true”.

My vote is to experience amnesia with regards to Delta’s. :brain:

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I haven’t personally had problems deploying the deltas or the cumulatives, I just dislike dealing with larger baselines out of the need for deploying both.

I guess an argument that may trump everything else is:

If the sole benefit of Deltas is a smaller file size, that benefit is null if even a single endpoint requires a CU at a given site.

So if I have 10 sites with 10 relays at each and at least one endpoint at each site needs a CU, then the Delta is no longer a benefit.

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Hi Steve - Will you be able to create a poll like I think you did for the change proposal for superseded fixlets?

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Anyone should be able to create a poll using the Options icon in the post editing dialog, but I kicked us off for this topic here: POLL - How important are Delta Update patches?

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“Now that express update support for third-party update managers has been available for over a year, we plan to stop shipping delta updates. Beginning February 12, 2019 Microsoft will end its practice of creating delta updates for all versions of Windows 10. Express updates are much smaller in size, and simplifying the cumulative options available will reduce complexity for IT administrators.”

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Good and bad news I guess. The “Good”; no more deltas. The “Bad”, Express updates will only work with WU and not 3rd parties, like BigFix (educated guess).

The MS claim is that the Express Updates API was opened for third-party products to use. I have no idea how well it works, or whether anyone uses it.

@AlexaVonTess see the new Cumulative only option: Windows 10 / Windows 2016 Cumulative Only Update Option now Available

We’ve been seeing issues with Deltas also, and thought this would help.

Yes, I did see that and thought it was a great method to allow customers to choose those. Though our Deltas are already in process for August patching, we’ll be setting the Client Setting for remediation. If all looks better, we’ll set it for all.

Thank you for this!