4640 – Exacq

Description

This ticket contains likely KB information for Windows images.

First there are wikis here:

The the first wiki is probably of most relevant here.

Our image is based on Windows 10 Enterprise 1607 LTSB (Long Term Service Branch)
LTSB means the same thing here as it does for ubuntu. It is/was a mature, stable release that Microsoft will support for a longer duration than standard Windows Pro.

Arrow is our Microsoft products supplier. You can see their EOL schedule of MS products here:
https://www.arrow.com/arrow-services/msembedded/resource/lifecycle-and-support-schedule

As for Windows Updates. all of Windows Updates automatic-ness is disabled, such as notifiers, automatic downloads and of course automatic installs. However, the Windows Update feature is still available and functional. A user must voluntarily go “Check for Windows Updates” For LTSx versions of Windows only Security and Critical updates will ever be downloaded. (They may come in the form of a cumulative update). I don’t think that LTSx versions of Windows are subject to Microsoft’s obsolescence schedule like Pro and other retail versions where you must downloaded and install updates according to a minimum schedule or else become unsupported.

Every quarter we create a new image from scratch with only the latest updates installed. The image does not carry along baggage from previous quarter’s updates, failures, etc.

We do plan on moving to Windows LTSC 1809 early next year 03/2020.
LTSC = LTSB (Microsoft just likes to change up the acronyms from time to time)
LTSC = Long Term Service Channel (instead of Branch)

We will also plan on moving from Windows Server 2016 to Windows Server 2019, probably after migrating regular Windows 10.

Windows Server 2016 is based on 1607
Windows Server 2019 is based on 1809