The Microsoft Solution Accelerator Team recently announced the release of a new tool to allow the management and patching of the offline virtual machines. This will allow an administrator to update an offline set of virtual machines with the latest patches, avoiding the security risks associated to exposing an outdated system into the network when putting back online the virtual machine.
The Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool works with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 and with either Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 or Microsoft Windows Server Update Services to manage the updates.
Finally, this tool will compete with VMWare Update Manager plug-in who has the ability to manage updates on ESX nodes so also Linux and Windows guest. So this is another more competitive feature that brings Microsoft Virtualization and Hyper-V at the top level of this market channel.
