Year 2 Update Regarding ESU Patching Add-on for Windows 2008

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We’ve had several customers come to us with questions about installing Year 2 Windows ESU patches. Microsoft’s ESU Year 2 started with Patch Tuesday on 9 February 2021.

If you have not applied your Microsoft Year 2 MAK to your endpoints, then your endpoints will report back in as relevant to the (Unentitled) Fixlets and you will not be able to apply those patches, neither via BigFix nor manually.

Once you have your Year 2 MAK from Microsoft, then you may use the “ESU Key Management: Install and Activate MAK” task (fixlet ID 1) in the BigFix ESU patch sites to apply your Year 2 ESU key to the appropriate endpoints. This is the same process you used when you applied the Year 1 MAK at the start of the ESU program. Then you can resume using the ESU Fixlets.

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To confirm, We have a 2 year ESU license with Microsoft, but a 1 year ESU Bigfix license expiring March. Do we need to renew the ESU on each server, plus renew the BF license?

And yes, we are seeing the “Unentitled” patches

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To reply to the last paragraph:
Most of my existing ESU servers do not have internet access so the fixlet does not work. We have to manually enter an activation key from the Microsoft site using slmgr.

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@Meyday Yes you’ll want to renew the BigFix ESU subscription so you can deliver ESU patches using BigFix.

Unfortunately you’ve also got to distribute those Year 2 ESU keys to install the February 2021 patches too. The patch executables won’t install with the Year 1 keys.

Just curious, do you mean you install them manually using slmgr, or do you use ActivationWs or VAMT for the ones without Internet access?

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I cannot remember the reasoning but last year it was determined that VAMT would not work. We had Microsoft give us a dedicated site for activation, which is expired now.

So I’m a little confused. I just checked one server and it shows “Licensed”. It should have been a 2 yr when activated.
In console this servers shows relevant and applicable to the Feb 2021 ESU (unentitled) patches, but according to the paragraph above it says they will not apply. My window for this server is 2 days from now so I cannot test yet.

EDIT: I figured it out. The licensed MAK is the yr1, and I need to update that server to the yr2.

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