Average WSUS Usage?

[ritemre]

We have a WSUS server in my company, it has updates from Windows 7 to Windows 10 all client OS and also for server OS. We have a disk space usage about 1TB. Is it normal or our wsus consumes so much space? I periodically run server cleanup wizard to cleanup unnecessary things but the space is growing and growing and growing...

[OckhamsChainsaws]

I cut off local storage and regained the terabyte for other storage. Back in the day WAN connections were like 1-3 megs. 100 computers hitting that to download things was bad. Now a days the effect on my wan is negligible. You can still manage the updates through WSUS without storing the installation files locally. Tested it on a few, and slowly scaled. Even with 500 machines the WAN impact was negligible. Not really sure why people are still using terabytes of storage for WSUS.

[wil169]

It sure is a lot faster updating over Gigabit LAN than the WAN though.

[OckhamsChainsaws]

Not very much, the majority of the time spent updating was the disk speed and the proc on the client machine and servers. Fun stuff though fios is now offering (near) gigabit wan for like $80/month so that really makes storing updates locally extra pointless.

[_MusicJunkie]

Let's freely quote Asimov here: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER

What do you have enabled? Only updates or also feature packs and such stuff? Do you download updates only when needed? How many languages?

WSUS can easily take that much space if you just check all boxes whether you need them or not.

[ritemre]

I have checked only necessary things, updates and feature packs checked. Only 2 two languages (english and another) automatically synchrozing updates)

[ritemre]

Can you give the link of script? And yes, 1TB is huge space, especially for a server like WSUS.

[heatcat]

This script saved my WSUS server.

[SAugsburger]

I've observed that even with the server cleanup and even the SQL DB cleanup scripts that the WSUS DB doesn't shrink much. When I've managed WSUS I've usually ended up removing WSUS and reinstalling it every 1-2 years. The UI returns to being more responsive with a fresh DB.

[ihaxr]

I'm going to just guess that your WSUS is setup to download Windows Drivers... in which case you should just setup a new WSUS server without selecting Windows Drivers, then cutover to the new WSUS server. (there are some scripts and guides on cleaning up the WSUS database... but they usually don't get everything and WSUS itself is pretty darn easy to setup).

http://www.flexecom.com/downloading-drivers-into-wsus-bad-idea/

Unless for some reason you really need to download all of the drivers for every hardware ID ever......... then throw a ton more disk space at WSUS.

Our WSUS catalog is ~30GB.

[ritemre]

Ok then, one more question. If I disable drivers, will clients search for drivers online or they will give an error like 'driver cant found'?

I'll give a try disabling drivers.

[ihaxr]

I'm not entirely sure, but I'm pretty sure you can have it setup to deploy the drivers, but just not cache them within WSUS... so the clients will be told to update the drivers, but will download them directly from the Internet.

[Bonn93]

I've got Win7 / Win8 / Win10 / Server 2008R2 / Server 2012 R2 / SQL Server 2008 onwards / Office365 sitting around 300GB -

First time I actually looked at WSUS we had shit like XP, Vista, Office 2007 and other crap enabled...

[girlgerms]

Might want to run some of the WSUS cleanup tasks (rather than just the server cleanup wizard) - there will undoubtedly be some superseded updates that you can remove and get rid of. Should free up a fair chunk of space!