Tuesday 20 July 2010

The WSUS Cleanup Wizard on SBS 2003 and SBS 2008

On some of our older and more crusty SBS 2003 R2 installs with WSUS v3 installed, we need to run the Cleanup Wizard on a fairly regular basis to keep the SBS Reports from having a blank page with an error.

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Given that some of these older boxes may not have multiple cores or even HyperThreading enabled on them, the cleanup process can  actually impact the server’s performance big time.

When the wizard starts, the process should actually be run in two steps.

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The first step will take anywhere up to 30-60 minutes depending on the age and speed of the box.

The second step can take _days_ even on boxes we frequently run the wizard on.

The Cleanup complete screen below actually took close to 36 hours to complete:

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Besides being a part of our regular maintenance routine on both SBS 2003 and SBS 2008 boxes, we also need to run the wizard prior to running a migration to make sure to trim things down.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

3 comments:

Andy Parkes said...

I'm glad it's not me then!

Everytime I run that wizard and it sits there for days i wonder if there is something wrong!

Anonymous said...

Where would you find the WSUS Cleanup Wizard on SBS 2008?

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

The WSUS Cleanup Wizard is found in the WSUS Console either in the Administrative Tools folder or the SBS Native Tools console.

Philip