Rebuilding your Essentials server without losing WSUS settings

Here’s a good question that came up in the Essentials Support Forum Recently.

Question: How can I rebuild my Essentials 2007 Server without losing my WSUS approvals?

Answer: Uninstalling SCE 2007 will also uninstall the WSUS 3.0 instance that is installed with it. However, you can choose to retain the updates when running uninstall wizard. As for your WSUS configuration, you can export the configuration to an xml file with the wsusmigrationexport.exe and wsusmigrationimport.exe tools.

At a high level, you’ll basically

1. Export your WSUS approvals to an xml file with  wsusmigrationexport.exe
2. Uninstall Essentials (and thus WSUS), retaining your updates that have been downloaded.
3. Install WSUS 3.0 on your Essentials Server.
4. Import the  xml settings file into WSUS with wsusmigrationimport.exe
5. Reinstall Essential.

Download this tool along with WSUS 3.0 API samples at the URL below.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=117680

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