We are delighted to announce we have manually added KB5017220 and KB5017221 to patch management.

What are they?

As you know Microsoft recently ended their extended support for Server 2012/2012R2 on the 10th of October 2023 but will continue to provide security updates.

Microsoft provided the steps required to continue to receive security updates to those devices:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb5031043-procedure-to-continue-receiving-security-updates-after-extended-support-has-ended-on-october-10-2023-c1a20132-e34c-402d-96ca-1e785ed51d45

Within these steps, you will notice they advise you to install these ESU Licensing Preparation Packages

Why did we do this?

Unfortunately, they did not make these available to the Windows Update channel requiring you to download these from their website and install them manually.

Taking advantage of one of our more recent feature enhancements, where we added support for manual-only Out of Band Updates we have added these.

Please note: there are a couple of things we had to do to make it work with our current feature. The publish date of the patch will show as 23rd November and the title will include [Out of Band].

Example: “2022-08 Extended Security Updates (ESU) Licensing Preparation Package for Windows Server 2012 R2 for x64-based Systems (KB5017220)[Out-of-Band]”

We will however look to see how we can enhance the date and name for any similar situations in the future.

These patches should be live tonight, a new detection scan will be needed to discover them per device

Please note that On-premise servers without Azure-arc require further steps as per the MSFT article

We are committed to providing you with the best possible experiences with our solutions and hope you appreciate the effort that went into removing this hurdle for you.