I am managing 2 SharePoint servers 2013, which are installed inside windows server 2008 R2, as follow:-
- Dev Farm. Which have both sql server & SharePoint on the same VM.
- Live Farm. Which have 2 VMs; SharePoint & sql server.
Now I am facing this problem:-
- Our system admin patch our servers each month.
What they do is that they install the patches from this link https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin , which contain windows, office & SharePoint security updates
And this is part of our security policy to make sure our servers Dev & live have the latest security updates.
- My problem is that these patches sometimes contain SharePoint security updates, and installing these updates will mainly update some SharePoint features which might cause un-expected problems.
- Mainly because some SharePoint security updates such as https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2965219 , include non-security fixes.
Currently I am approaching these patches as follow:-
- I inform our system admin to install the patches on our Dev machine first.
- Then I run the SharePoint product configuration wizard.
- After that I test all the site collections + managed services (we have managed Meta data & search) + layout.
- If I find any problem, we will not patch the live server unless I fix any problem on Dev.if my test did not find any problem , we patch our live server, then I run the product configuration wizard , do a smoke test..
The problem of my current approach:-
- It is really time consuming, sometimes I spend 2 days to do full test on dev.
- Sometimes SharePoint security updates will change the farm build number. For example in our case , the last time I install a full CU was on October 2014 (since it contain fixes to problem we were facing) and I got this farm build number 15.0.4659.1001. after that i have never apply any full CU. but we have been patching our servers each month and this result in upgrading our farm from 15.0.4659.1001 (Oct 2014) To 15.0.4763.1000 (Oct 2015). So now our farm have Oct 2015 farm build number 15.0.4763.1000, although we have not installed the related full CU.
So can anyone advice on these points:-
- Is it a valid and recommended approach to install all the security patches from this link https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin , each month. Or we should exclude SharePoint updates?
- Do I need to install full CU after any SharePoint security patches? Or my current approach is valid ?
- will my farm get corrupted or hard to track, if i keep installing SharePoint security updates in this way ?